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Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
-J. G. Ballard
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There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
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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
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One might speak to great length of the three corners of reality what was seen, what was thought to be seen, and what was thought ought to be seen.
-Marvel Bell
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It's d`ej`a vu all over again!
-Yogi Berra
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Fear not what is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.
-Bhagavad Gita
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The reality of life is that your perceptions -- right or wrong -- influence everything else you do. When you get a proper perspective of your perceptions, you may be surprised how many other things fall into place.
-Roger Birkman
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a pit.
-Ernest Bramah
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Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
-Bertolt Brecht
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This sort of adoration of the real is but a heightening of the beau ideal.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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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
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Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.
-Thomas Carlyle
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To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.
-Deepak Chopra
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Reality is neither good nor bad; it just is.
-Arbie M. Dale
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In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.
-Serge Daney
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We must learn to tailor our concepts to fit reality, instead of trying to stuff reality into our concepts.
-Victor Daniels
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Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars--namely, the opening of the eyes, the motion of the head, the forth- putting of the hands--are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities; and, therefore, that those general objects, at all events, namely, eyes, a head, hands, and an entire body, are not simply imaginary, but really existent. For, in truth, painters themselves, even when they study to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most fantastic and extraordinary, cannot bestow upon them natures absolutely new, but can only make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or if they chance to imagine something so novel that nothing at all similar has ever been seen before, and such as is, therefore, purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is at least certain that the colors of which this is composed are real. And on the same principle, although these general objects, viz. a body, eyes, a head, hands, and the like, be imaginary, we are nevertheless absolutely necessitated to admit the reality at least of some other objects still more simple and universal than these, of which, just as of certain real colors, all those images of things, whether true and real, or false and fantastic, that are found in our consciousness (cogitatio), are formed.
-Rene Descartes, Meditation I
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-Philip K. Dick
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Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
-Philip K. Dick
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Realists do not fear the results of their study.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.
-Norman Douglas
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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
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Our intention creates our reality.
-Wayne Dyer
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It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
-Albert Einstein, 1933
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We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
-George Eliot
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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, from Burnt Norton (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
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You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
-Federico Fellini
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A cause a day keeps reality away.
-Jim Fraser
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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 Psychoanalysis quoted in introduction to Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl
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It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
-Margaret Fuller
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Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
-Graham Greene
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The stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do.
-Erich Gutkind
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Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
-Hermann Hesse
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To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.
-Hubert Humphrey
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Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
-Eugene Ionesco
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Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Real and the Surreal, 1933
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I believe that sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.
-Garrison Keillor
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The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of this planet.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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It has sometimes been said that we find nowhere in nature an analogue of the difference between happens and is, on the one hand, and ought, on the other hand.
-Wolfgang Kohler
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People see the world not as it is, but as they are.
-Al Lee
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Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
-Bruce Lee
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The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
-Abraham Lincoln
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-Georg Luk, The Theory of the Novel
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Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.
-Ralph Marston
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All the things you think you should have done that you didn't do, and all of the things that you shouldn't have done, accept them. You did (or did not) do them. That's reality. That's happened. No changing the past.
-Peter McWilliams
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One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.
-Thomas Merton
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Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.
-Henry Miller
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Reality is something you rise above.
-Liza Minnelli
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Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
-George Moore
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A theory must be tempered with reality.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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It takes only one other person to say it's so-one other point of reality to make something real.
-Mal Pancoast
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Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest --thought, action --is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
-Cesare Pavese
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Reality is for people who can't face drugs.
-Laurence J. Peter
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You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
-Luigi Pirandello
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Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be -- like the reality of yesterday -- an illusion tomorrow.
-Luigi Pirandello
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There are occasions when it is undoubtedly better to incur loss than to make gain.
-Plautus
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When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
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Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.
-Robert J. Ringer
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I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.
-Jean Rostand
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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
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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
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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
-Huston Smith
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But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.
-Baruch (_Benedict de) Spinoza
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The successful people of this world take life as it comes. They just go out and deal with the world as it is.
-Ben Stein
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The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
-Gertrude Stein
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The genuine artist is never true to life. He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
-Wallace Stevens
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
-Wallace Stevens
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Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
-Lily Tomlin
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In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
-Lionel Trilling
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The truly educated man is that rare individual who can separate reality from illusion.
-Source Unknown
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If someone offers to furnish a sure test, ask what the test was which made the sure test sure.
-Source Unknown
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How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
-Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, July 1885
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The pessimist complains about the wind;
The optimist expects it to change;
And the realist adjusts the sails.
-William Arthur Ward
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Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
-Simone Weil
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A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
-Simone Weil
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I accept reality and dare not question it.
-Walt Whitman
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I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
-Oscar Wilde
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What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying
-Virginia Woolf
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There was once a man in China who liked pictures of dragons. His clothing and his furniture were therefore accordingly adorned with dragons. This deep affection for their kind was brought to the attention of the Dragon Lord, who one day sent a real dragon to stand outside the man's window. It is said that he probably died of fright.
-Yamamoto Tsunetomo, from Hagakure (Hidden in the Leaves), 1716
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No authority is higher than reality.
-Peter Nivio Zarlenga
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What is a lie? It is to say what is real is not real. It is to deny the existence of what exists.
-Peter Nivio Zarlenga
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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
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Books about Reality
