quotations about reality
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
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attributed, The World of Mathematics
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
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
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
Midnight's Children
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Reality is divinely indifferent.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
The fact that different species perceive reality very differently is quite evident. But it gets particularly interesting when it comes to human bodily experience. We are the only species able to transform our bodily perceptions into language that can then be used to create primary metaphors that then can be used to create more abstract metaphors. When we stop to think about how much of our daily communications are based upon bodily metaphors, we begin to realize how important bodily experience is to the thinking process. We "grasp" an idea, are out of "touch" with reality, "stretch" our mind, "grab" onto a possibility, "walk" through a problem, "feel" someone's pain, "smell" a rat, "see" through what someone is telling us, "lose ground," "stand up" for our principles, "run" up a bill, "stumble" into a relationship, and on and on. It is through the use of metaphors ... that we imagine and construct most of our reality. Using metaphors is a way of enriching our bodily experience and giving us a story-line that others can use to identify with us because they too base their experience on a common bodily, spatial, and temporal orientation that is the same for all human beings.
JEREMY RIFKIN
The Empathetic Civilization
What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance?
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
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
I like reality. It tastes like bread.
JEAN ANOUILH
Plays
Whatever reality is, it's not that.
HERMAN NORTHROP FRYE
The Anatomy of Criticism
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
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
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
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
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Against Certainty"
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
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
It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.
RICK RIORDAN
The Lightning Thief