REALITY QUOTES
quotations about reality
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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
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
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
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.
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
What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance?
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN, The Problems of Philosophy
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
Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.
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.
Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?
Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN, The Problems of Philosophy
Imagination might be scarier than reality ... but not by much.
The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.
KEN KESEY, Sometimes a Great Notion
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
GARRISON KEILLOR, attributed, The Mammoth Book of Zingers
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. ELIOT, Murder in the Cathedral
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Tomorrow changes the face of reality.
PHILIP JOSE FARMER, The Lovers
Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.
ALAN MOORE, What Is Reality?
Reality has always had too many heads.
BOB DYLAN, "Cold Irons Bound"
The fact that different species perceive reality very differently is quite evident. But it gets particularly interesting when it comes to human bodily experience. We are the only species able to transform our bodily perceptions into language that can then be used to create primary metaphors that then can be used to create more abstract metaphors. When we stop to think about how much of our daily communications are based upon bodily metaphors, we begin to realize how important bodily experience is to the thinking process. We "grasp" an idea, are out of "touch" with reality, "stretch" our mind, "grab" onto a possibility, "walk" through a problem, "feel" someone's pain, "smell" a rat, "see" through what someone is telling us, "lose ground," "stand up" for our principles, "run" up a bill, "stumble" into a relationship, and on and on. It is through the use of metaphors ... that we imagine and construct most of our reality. Using metaphors is a way of enriching our bodily experience and giving us a story-line that others can use to identify with us because they too base their experience on a common bodily, spatial, and temporal orientation that is the same for all human beings.
JEREMY RIFKIN, The Empathetic Civilization
Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call "reality". However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?
ITACHI UCHIHA, Naruto: Shippūden
Our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW, The Grand Design
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
JOHN LENNON, attributed, As Time Goes By: Living in the Sixties with John Lennon
There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.
EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros
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