Inescapable Reality Quotes

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.

There is no way to escape death, it is just like trying to escape by four great mountains touching sky. There is no escape from these four mountains of birth, old age, sickness and death.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Sometimes, what you do you have no control over because it's predestined. It's gonna happen in spite of you. There's nothing you can do about it.

Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.

We don't have any problems, apart from the problems we have.

It is my opinion that everything must be based on a simple idea. And it is my opinion that this idea, once we have finally discovered it, will be so compelling, so beautiful, that we will say to one another, yes, how could it have been any different.

Man is the creature of circumstances.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier.

The terrible sticky thing about truth is if it exists, it's coming for you.

Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body

My films do have characters who have trouble escaping the world around them.

Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.

My life is not unlike Truman's. I can't go anywhere.

I am the very slave of circumstance

You know, I think in some kinds of ways, we are all born into stuff that gives us no choice.

Truth allows no choice.