QuoteProject
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
Chuck Palahniuk
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Imagined ideas and concepts hold more power than tangible realities.

This quote emphasizes the power and endurance of ideas and fantasies over physical objects and life itself. While the material world is subject to decay and mortality, the human imagination can create perfect ideals that can influence and inspire, suggesting that what we conceive in our minds can have a greater impact than what exists in the physical realm.

Themes

ImaginationIdeasBeliefsPowerIntangible

In practice

Example use cases

During a motivational speech about creativity and innovation.

More from Chuck Palahniuk

There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.
Chuck PalahniukRead
Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Chuck PalahniukRead
If we can forgive what’s been done to us... If we can forgive what we’ve done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
Chuck PalahniukRead
We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.
Chuck PalahniukRead
One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.
Chuck PalahniukRead
If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.
Chuck PalahniukRead

Similar quotes

That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
Frank MccourtRead
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
Carl SaganRead
It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.
Nikos KazantzakisRead
Realize that illness and other temporal setbacks often come to us from the hand of God our Lord, and are sent to help us know ourselves better, to free ourselves of the love of created things, and to reflect on the brevity of this life and, thus, to prepare ourselves for the life which is without end.
Saint IgnatiusRead
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
Eckhart TolleRead
We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.
John TrudellRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Chuck Palahniuk | QuoteProject