Quotes about reality

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

— J. G. Ballard

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

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

— Jean Baudrillard

One might speak to great length of the three corners of reality what was seen, what was thought to be seen, and what was thought ought to be seen.

— Marvel Bell

Fear not what is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.

— Bhagavad Gita

The reality of life is that your perceptions -- right or wrong -- influence everything else you do. When you get a proper perspective of your perceptions, you may be surprised how many other things fall into place.

— Roger Birkman

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

— Swami Brahmanada

He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a pit.

— Ernest Bramah

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

— Bertolt Brecht

This sort of adoration of the real is but a heightening of the beau ideal.

— Lord Byron

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

— Albert Camus

Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.

— Thomas Carlyle

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

— Deepak Chopra

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

— Jean Cocteau

Reality is neither good nor bad; it just is.

— Arbie M. Dale

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

— Serge Daney

We must learn to tailor our concepts to fit reality, instead of trying to stuff reality into our concepts.

— Victor Daniels

Everything is self-evident.

— Rene Descartes

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

— Philip K. Dick

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

— Philip K. Dick

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

— Norman Douglas

Our intention creates our reality.

— Wayne Dyer

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

— Albert Einstein

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

— George Eliot

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

— T. S. Eliot

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A cause a day keeps reality away.

— Jim Fraser

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

— Margaret Fuller

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

— Graham Greene

The stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do.

— Erich Gutkind

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

— Hermann Hesse

To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

— Eugene Ionesco

The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of this planet.

— John F. Kennedy

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

It has sometimes been said that we find nowhere in nature an analogue of the difference between happens and is, on the one hand, and ought, on the other hand.

— Wolfgang Kohler

People see the world not as it is, but as they are.

— Al Lee

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

— Bruce Lee

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

— John Lennon

The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

— Abraham Lincoln

Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.

— Ralph Marston

All the things you think you should have done that you didn't do, and all of the things that you shouldn't have done, accept them. You did (or did not) do them. That's reality. That's happened. No changing the past.

— Peter Mcwilliams

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

— Henry Miller

Reality is something you rise above.

— Liza Minnelli

Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?

— George Moore

A theory must be tempered with reality.

— Jawaharlal Nehru

It takes only one other person to say it's so-one other point of reality to make something real.

— Mal Pancoast

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest --thought, action --is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

— Cesare Pavese

Reality is for people who can't face drugs.

— Laurence J. Peter

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

— Luigi Pirandello

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be -- like the reality of yesterday -- an illusion tomorrow.

— Luigi Pirandello

There are occasions when it is undoubtedly better to incur loss than to make gain.

— Titus Maccius Plautus

Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.

— Robert J. Ringer

I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

— Jean Rostand

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

The realist is the man, who having weighed all the visible factors in a given situation and having found that the odds are against him, decides that fighting is useless.

— Raoul De Sales

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

— Huston Smith

The successful people of this world take life as it comes. They just go out and deal with the world as it is.

— Ben Stein

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

— Gertrude Stein

The genuine artist is never true to life. He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

— Wallace Stevens

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

— Wallace Stevens

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

— Lily Tomlin

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

— Lionel Trilling

The truly educated man is that rare individual who can separate reality from illusion.

— Source Unknown

If someone offers to furnish a sure test, ask what the test was which made the sure test sure.

— Source Unknown

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

— Simone Weil

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

— Simone Weil

I accept reality and dare not question it.

— Walt Whitman

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

— Oscar Wilde

What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

— Virginia Woolf

No authority is higher than reality.

— Peter Nivio Zarlenga

What is a lie? It is to say what is real is not real. It is to deny the existence of what exists.

— Peter Nivio Zarlenga

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. what we take to be true is our reality.

— Gary Zukav

We are all living inside a box and we get our information from a box. The box is not real, but we are.

— James Dye

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.

— Thich Nhat Hahn

There are no adults in this world: only large children.

— Robert A. Dato

Creativity is more important than reality. However this doesn't make reality unimportant.

— A. Brandon Trean

In the true nature of oblivion, what is not fathomed is devoid of existence" - Stephen Lesanjo

— Source Unknown

When men at forward fail to achieve the goal, they describe the victory lies in defending.

— mirza sharafat hussain zarafshan

When we are in love with wordly lusts, we keep religion in dust. Despite when wishes are themselves decomposed, we come out with black turbans coiled to make fools even more.

— mirza sharafat hussain zarafshan

God may soon fell in love with his own trimmed Goddess, made to make me mad. I bet veiling up her luminous facade is so useless as her beauty scatters in the gloom of my Lonely nights.

— mirza sharafat hussain zarafshan