quotations about reality
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Our focus is our reality. What we choose to focus on becomes our world. It produces our thoughts, values, attitudes, and beliefs.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
Make Peace With Anyone
Each for himself creates the world in which he dwells.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Half-Heard"
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
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.
LUCY JONES
Newsweek, October 15, 2007
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
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
attributed, The World of Mathematics
There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
If you know how much reality is getting in, then you know a great deal about what a person sees to be true.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
You Can Read Anyone
Having seen particles first become symbols and then become bit patterns in a Continuum Quantum Computer, having seen the interactions between bit patterns similarly reduced to bit patterns we now come to the conclusion that the universe and its physical laws -- Reality -- is in essence linguistic -- Language.
STEPHEN BLAHA
The Metatheory of Physics Theories
Dreams are my reality
A different kind of reality
I dream of loving in the night
And loving seems alright
Although it's only fantasy.
RICHARD SANDERSON
"Reality"
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The unusual perception,
Teaming with complicated insecurities,
Swarming wonderings,
Flittering possibilities.
Questioning the uncertainties,
Answering ... nothing.
Only questioning.
NICHOLAS MARTIN
"Reality", Poems of Reality
Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Fall of the Towers
Where is reality?... It is something dark and dramatic that is present but cannot be grasped for it has no visible form and, therefore, can be neither described nor represented. Reality ... is not to be found in description but in a certain underlying mood. It mysteriously appears when bidden by a call of the political order. Once that summons is made, reality appears.
JOSÉ MARÍA MORENO GALVÁN
attributed, "Nauru: What Reality is This?", Counterpunch, January 22, 2016
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
I realized that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way