quotations about reality
Don't mess around with reality and reality won't mess around with you.
ERNIE J. ZELINSKI
101 Really Important Things You Already Know But Keep Forgetting
Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
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
In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
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
There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
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
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
Each for himself creates the world in which he dwells.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Half-Heard"
It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.
RICK RIORDAN
The Lightning Thief
The fact that different species perceive reality very differently is quite evident. But it gets particularly interesting when it comes to human bodily experience. We are the only species able to transform our bodily perceptions into language that can then be used to create primary metaphors that then can be used to create more abstract metaphors. When we stop to think about how much of our daily communications are based upon bodily metaphors, we begin to realize how important bodily experience is to the thinking process. We "grasp" an idea, are out of "touch" with reality, "stretch" our mind, "grab" onto a possibility, "walk" through a problem, "feel" someone's pain, "smell" a rat, "see" through what someone is telling us, "lose ground," "stand up" for our principles, "run" up a bill, "stumble" into a relationship, and on and on. It is through the use of metaphors ... that we imagine and construct most of our reality. Using metaphors is a way of enriching our bodily experience and giving us a story-line that others can use to identify with us because they too base their experience on a common bodily, spatial, and temporal orientation that is the same for all human beings.
JEREMY RIFKIN
The Empathetic Civilization
The unusual perception,
Teaming with complicated insecurities,
Swarming wonderings,
Flittering possibilities.
Questioning the uncertainties,
Answering ... nothing.
Only questioning.
NICHOLAS MARTIN
"Reality", Poems of Reality
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
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
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"
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
Reality is divinely indifferent.
RICHARD BACH
Illusions
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967