quotations about reality
Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
I turned around to face the reality, which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now flushed, feline, lethal, and electric and about to blow a fuse.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
The things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design
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
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun, January 13, 2003
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
letter to Countee Cullen, 1943
Physicists almost never talk about reality. The problem is that what people tend to mean by "reality" has more to do with biology and evolution and with our hardwiring and our neural architecture than it has to do with physics itself. We're prisoners of our own neural architecture. We can visualize some things. We can't visualize other things.... So I say, let's get rid of the word "reality." Let's have our whole discussion without the word "reality." It gets in the way. It conjures up things that are rarely helpful. The word "reproducible" is a more useful word than "real."
LEONARD SUSSKIND
Scientific American, July 2011
A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves also be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design
The taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Lectures on the Philosophy of History