quotations about reality
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
He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.
PETER BERGER
"The Social Construction of Reality"
For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it is not enough
Because it is disorderly and stupid.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
Reality plants a thorny hedge around our dreaming, while the sporting ground of the possible is ever free and open.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
If you try hard enough, you can bend the spoon; you can shift reality.
CHRISTOPHER MELONI
Men's Health, December 2005
Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
Imagination might be scarier than reality ... but not by much.
JAMES SIEGEL
Detour
What we call reality is the inevitable persistence of a fact of consciousness.
SAMUEL HARRIS
The Philosophical Basis of Theism
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
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
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.
ANAÏS NIN
diary, July 7, 1934
Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
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
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight's Children
There's no remaking reality.... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way.
PHILIP ROTH
Everyman
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
We all want so badly to divorce reality, but that bitch just won't sign the papers.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality -- to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove