Reality Quotes

These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

Sigmund Freud, New Lectures in P

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

Simone Weil

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

Deepak Chopra

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a pit.

Ernest Bramah

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

Swami Brahmanada

Reality is neither good nor bad; it just is.

Arbie M. Dale

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

Henry David Thoreau

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

Albert Camus

Reality is for people who can't face drugs.

Laurence J. Peter

We are all living inside a box and we get our information from a box. The box is not real, but we are.

James Dye

The reality of the other person lies not in what he reveals to you but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

Kahlil Gibran

The realist is the man, who having weighed all the visible factors in a given situation and having found that the odds are against him, decides that fighting is useless.

Raoul De Sales

There, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a mans reaction to monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be debunked;' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

C.S. Lewis

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. what we take to be true is our reality.

Gary Zukav

As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.

Neil Gaiman

But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our 'real' world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism. It is, in fine, 'the philosophy of Hermes that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, as they counterfeit some real substance in that visible fabrick'. The difference between the two can hardly be exaggerated. The allegorist leaves the given -- his own passions -- to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. To put the difference in another way, for the symbolist it is we who are the allegory. We are the 'frigid personifications'; the heavens above us are the 'shadowy abstractions'; the world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions.

C.S. Lewis

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

George Bernard Shaw

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal

Jean Baudrillard

The seven marvels that best represent man's achievements over the last 2,000 years will be determined by Internet vote... so look for Howard Stern's Private Parts to come in No. 1.

Jon Stewart