quotations about reality
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?
My belief, through my experiences, is that the world in which we live is but an illusionary world, a world that one day we will leave behind as we travel on toward our destiny and toward reality.
ROSEMARY ALTEA
The Eagle and the Rose
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
ANNE CARSON
Autobiography of Red
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, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
Reality is created by the action of Mind from the Void.
DIANE STEIN
Essential Reiki
Reality has always had too many heads.
BOB DYLAN
"Cold Irons Bound"
Hope is vital. It keeps us going in the face of what we know in our hearts are closed doors and shrinking opportunities. But reality is not something to be ignored. Reality opens doors and provides opportunities. Just maybe not the exact ones we dreamed of 30 years ago.
JOE SELDNER
"A Much-Needed Reality Check for People Over 50", Huffington Post, February 6, 2016
Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
One of the most important things in life is to understand reality and to keep changing our images to correspond to it, for it is our images which determine our actions and feelings, and the more accurate they are the easier it will be for us to attain happiness and stay happy in an ever-changing world.
ERIC BERNE
The Mind in Action
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
Have you ever considered that your perception of reality could be wrong? If you haven't, this is a pretty good sign that it is.
ERNIE J. ZELINSKI
Look Ma, Life's Easy
You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.
JELALUDDIN RUMI
The Essential Rumi
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
STEPHEN COLBERT
remarks at White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, 2006
Reality is not bland!
Reality is coloured in a million colours,
Reality is dyed in a million dyes,
Reality is flavoured in a million flavours,
Reality is as it should be and nothing else.
JASDEEP HARI BHAJAN SINGH KHALSA
"Colours of Reality", Poems for the Aquarian Age: 2013 The Age of Experience
How else learn the real,
if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Fifteen Pebbles"
What reality is the cockroach at my feet in the kitchen experiencing? It is not my reality, we only share the same space.
WERNER HERZOG
"Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality", The New Yorker, January 12, 2016
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
Far too often the choices reality proposes are such as to take away one's taste for choosing.
JEAN ROSTAND
The Substance of Man