quotations about reality
Reality is a formless lure,
And only when we know this
Do we dare to be unreal.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Dialogue Between a Past and Present Poet"
I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.
ANATOL RAPOPORT
Science and the Goals of Man: a study in semantic orientation
The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge.
J. J. ABRAMS
interview, The Fresno Bee, December 16, 2015
If you know how much reality is getting in, then you know a great deal about what a person sees to be true.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
You Can Read Anyone
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, As Time Goes By: Living in the Sixties with John Lennon
At the end of the day, reality is what's left when all enhanced realities are put away. It used to be easier to tell the difference--art, film, music, playstations--all of these enhanced realities were limited in their means and scope such that they could distract from, inform, communicate with, but not substitute for reality. Now technology has advanced and has become so integral to our personal and social lives that the line between enhanced reality and reality reality is blurred. Devices have become real extensions of our physical body in the virtual reality we've created for ourselves.
AMANDA KNOX
"Amanda's View: Reality is Better", Ballard News Tribune
Where is reality?... It is something dark and dramatic that is present but cannot be grasped for it has no visible form and, therefore, can be neither described nor represented. Reality ... is not to be found in description but in a certain underlying mood. It mysteriously appears when bidden by a call of the political order. Once that summons is made, reality appears.
JOSÉ MARÍA MORENO GALVÁN
attributed, "Nauru: What Reality is This?", Counterpunch, January 22, 2016
Whatever reality is, it's not that.
HERMAN NORTHROP FRYE
The Anatomy of Criticism
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
What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance?
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
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
attributed, Mystery in Life
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us.
LEENA KROHN
"Cracking the Codes of Leena Krohn", The New Yorker, January 13, 2016
Reality is not a fad That changes with the latest whim.
DAVID EDWIN HALL
"Rejoicing in Reality", Quiet Time Poems
Without poetry, reality is speechless.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
I realized that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana