Whoa, you two--this is exactly the kind of thing I meant in the post I just finished writing before I saw this one (about history being told from a male point of view).

wsieber, your take on the sage's meaning certainly makes a
lot of sense to me! Thank you. It is very true, no two
people seem to ever see the exact same thing. And the words we use to describe our world change the meaning of what reality is, like some experiments change the outcome just by the fact of being performed. Let me clarify with an example: can I convey the exact sense of the sky if I say it is blue, bleu, or azur? Of course not! No matter the language, it cannot replace reality. We have arbitrarily assigned specific sounds to certain things, but they are only representations, not the thing itself.
When I was a child and hurt myself, it used to surprise me that my mother could not feel the exact pain that I was feeling. Now, that would have been reality!

Re: stories, Avy--
I think all mankind has always loved stories, both as a way to preserve our history and thus ourselves, and as a safe means of escaping from reality, in too many ways to go into here. I'll just add that I love to be taken away into imagination-land.