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REALITY QUOTES II

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

ANAIS NIN, diary, Jul. 7, 1934

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

STEPHEN COLBERT, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, 2006

Each for himself creates the world in which he dwells.

CAROLINE SPENCER, "Half-Heard"

True reality is what we experience when all the perception is set aside. For instance, when we go to Yellowstone National Park and we are looking at the beautiful mountain covered with snow and we are in awe of its beauty, in that instance we are experiencing reality. We are not thinking about anything but rather are just experiencing. When we start to put some thought to our experience, that is when it becomes perception reather than true reality. That is when the perception becomes skewed because we are relating our past experiences to an interpretation of the present experience.

RODNEY GROVES, Stepping Stones to Personal Empowerment

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

ALAN MOORE, What Is Reality?

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

PETER BERGER, "The Social Construction of Reality"

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

GROUCHO MARX, attributed, Philosophy on the Go

The angel of reality is unknowable, a figure only partially apprehended, then transformed into something else in continuous movement--here and then gone.

DAVID MICHAEL HERTZ, Angels of Reality

Having seen particles first become symbols and then become bit patterns in a Continuum Quantum Computer, having seen the interactions between bit patterns similarly reduced to bit patterns we now come to the conclusion that the universe and its physical laws -- Reality -- is in essence linguistic -- Language.

STEPHEN BLAHA, The Metatheory of Physics Theories

Whatever reality is, it's not that.

HERMAN NORTHROP FRYE, The Anatomy of Criticism

If the true and ultimate reality is unknowable all reality is unknowable; what we take for reality is merely phenomenon, and what we take for knowledge is merely illusion.

SAMUEL HARRIS, The Philosophical Basis of Theism

Reality is subject to the mind's creation.

DIANE STEIN, Essential Reiki

There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY, attributed, Mystery in Life

Perhaps reality is something quite different from what is proposed in any theory and the only remaining constraint on our knowledge is our personal efforts to make our thoughts cohere with one another.

R. G. A. DOLBY, Uncertain Knowledge

What we call reality is the inevitable persistence of a fact of consciousness.

SAMUEL HARRIS, The Philosophical Basis of Theism

Reality is created by the action of Mind from the Void.

DIANE STEIN, Essential Reiki

Physicists almost never talk about reality. The problem is that what people tend to mean by "reality" has more to do with biology and evolution and with our hardwiring and our neural architecture than it has to do with physics itself. We're prisoners of our own neural architecture. We can visualize some things. We can't visualize other things.... So I say, let's get rid of the word "reality." Let's have our whole discussion without the word "reality." It gets in the way. It conjures up things that are rarely helpful. The word "reproducible" is a more useful word than "real."

LEONARD SUSSKIND, Scientific American, Jul. 2011

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

ANAIS NIN, The Novel of the Future

The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.

CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Crossing

We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana

A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves also be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?

STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW, The Grand Design

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, "Avatars of the Tortoise," Discussion

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

MICHIO KAKU, Hyperspace

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967

Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.

SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers

How else learn the real,
if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Fifteen Pebbles"

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