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QUOTES ON REALITY

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

MARGARET HALSEY, No Laughing Matter

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight's Children

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight's Children

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, Choke

If you try hard enough, you can bend the spoon; you can shift reality.

CHRISTOPHER MELONI, Men's Health, Dec. 2005

One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?

ALVIN TOFFLER, Future Shock

Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.

CHARLES DE LINT, The Onion Girl

Reality is a formless lure,
And only when we know this
Do we dare to be unreal.

MAXWELL BODENHEIM, "Dialogue Between a Past and Present Poet"

Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.

LUCY JONES, Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2007

Dogmas--religious, political, scientific--arise out of erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know."

ECKHART TOLLE, Stillness Speaks

Reality is divinely indifferent.

RICHARD BACH, Illusions

Imagination might be scarier than reality ... but not by much.

JAMES SIEGEL, Detour


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