quotations about reality
Reality is divinely indifferent.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.
RICK RIORDAN
The Lightning Thief
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
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
O the heart has dreams Elysian!
That steal o'er it calm and sweet,
Hushing pain like a magician
Who binds spirits at his feet.
WALTER RICHARD CASSELS
"Reality", Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul and Other Poems
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, As Time Goes By: Living in the Sixties with John Lennon
Reality is not a fad That changes with the latest whim.
DAVID EDWIN HALL
"Rejoicing in Reality", Quiet Time Poems
I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. You just get an overdose of reality, you know, and it's a terrible thing. I'm always fighting against reality.
WOODY ALLEN
attributed, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles
I realized that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.
ANATOL RAPOPORT
Science and the Goals of Man: a study in semantic orientation
There are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
I like reality. It tastes like bread.
JEAN ANOUILH
Plays
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?
GEORGE BERKELEY
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
Without poetry, reality is speechless.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Against Certainty"
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"