Quotations about Reality

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~Philip K. Dick


Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ~Albert Einstein


Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? ~M.C. Escher


No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. ~Samuel Johnson


How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. ~Abraham Lincoln


Most passport pictures are good likenesses, and it is time we faced it. ~Katharine Brush


There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values. ~David G. Myers, Social Psychology


Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor's new clothes. ~Connie Miller


Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. ~Sigmund Freud


How do we know that the sky is not green and we are all colour-blind? ~Author Unknown


There are no facts, only interpretations. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


What is reality anyway! It's nothing but a collective hunch. ~Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1985, performed by Lily Tomlin


What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist. ~Pablo Picasso


I am a thread too slender
To suspend all this reality...
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Madness," Love, Abstraction and other Speculations, www.originals.net


What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself. ~Lewis Mumford, "Orientation to Life," The Conduct of Life, 1951


Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. ~John Lennon


Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ~T.S. Eliot


Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion. ~Democritus


Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting. ~Eleanor Perenyi


What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable. ~Louise Nevelson


It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way. ~Andy Warhol


Few people have the imagination for reality. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another. ~John Burroughs


I have a very firm grasp on reality! I can reach out and strangle it any time! ~Author Unknown


Reality is not always probable, or likely. ~Jorge Luis Borges


Question reality, especially if it contradicts the evidence of your hopes and dreams. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly? ~Author Unknown


Okay, who put a "stop payment" on my reality check? ~Author Unknown



Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides. ~Frank Tyger


Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality." ~William James


It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. ~John Kenneth Galbraith


I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ~John Steinbeck


Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him? ~Calvin and Hobbes


Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet. ~Edward Abbey


All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality. ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain


All is illusion, although as long as there's an illusion that the kids need to be fed, all might as well be reality. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Reality bites... and doesn't let go. ~Author Unknown


The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it. ~Francis Bacon


The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864


How reluctantly the mind consents to reality! ~Norman Douglas


If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it. ~B. Quilliam


Reality is too much to take in heapfuls, but sprinkle it sparingly upon life's path and most can tread it lightly. ~Terri Guillemets


Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check. ~M.C. Escher


There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means. ~Daniel J. Boorstin


Reality is a palette that humans paint on to let themselves sleep better at night. ~Author Unknown


Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. ~Tom Robbins


I believe in a real, physical world. I figure if the world existed only in my mind, it would pay more attention to me. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there. ~E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1960


Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. ~Jules de Gaultier


Everything you can imagine is real. ~Pablo Picasso


Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
~Emily Dickinson, "Faith Is a Fine Invention," Poems, Second Series


Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak. ~Woody Allen


After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history. ~Author Unknown


One bright day in the middle of night two dead boys rose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another. A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too. ~Author Unknown


Illusion is the first of all pleasures. ~Voltaire


You must be blind if you can't see
The gaping hole called reality.
~Stereo MC's, "Connected"


This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof. ~Neil Gaiman, Books of Magic III


Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West


Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows. ~Jennifer Yane


As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
~Hughes Mearns


Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. ~Jane Wagner


An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. ~Mahatma Gandhi