Quotations about Reality

Quotations about Reality







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







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







How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!



~Norman Douglas








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




~B. Quilliam








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






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







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








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




~Jane Wagner








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








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




~Mahatma Gandhi










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






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








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




Reality is not always probable, or likely.




~Jorge Luis Borges








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







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








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







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





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




~Astrid Alauda