Reality

The supreme reality of our time is … the vulnerability of this planet. ~~ John F. Kennedy

Reality has changed chameleon-like before my eyes so many times that I have learned, or am learning, to trust almost anything except what appears to be so. ~~ Maya Angelou

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. ~~ Margaret Halsey

His mistaken belief in his own superiority cut him off from reality as completely as if he were living in a colored glass jar. ~~ Margery Allingham

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

For me words still possess their primitive, mystical, incantatory powers. I am inclined to use them as part of an attempt to make my own reality more real for others, as part of an effort to transcend emotional danger. For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience. ~~ Ingrid Bengis

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. ~~ Bertolt Brecht

There is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from... sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child. ~~ Anne Fadiman

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself. ~~ Berenice Abbott

Language helps form the limits of our reality. ~~ Dale Spender [Man Made Language]

True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values. ~~ Dean William Ralph Inge

A poem is like a wineglass in which you can hold up a little bit of reality and taste it. ~~ Gwen Harwood [Boundary Conditions]

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left. ~~ Orson Welles

Language is living, kicking, growing, fluttering, evolving reality, and the teacher should spontaneously reflect its vibrant and protean qualities. ~~ John A. Rassias

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense. ~~ Tom Clancy

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are. ~~ Henry Fielding

I like reality. It tastes of bread. ~~ Jean Anouilh

Some critics say that audiences complain about the movies because the movies do not reflect reality; it is this writer's suspicion that more people lament the fact that reality does not reflect the movies. ~~ Leo Rosten

I don't like work… but I like what is in work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--which no other man can ever know. ~~ Joseph Conrad [Heart of Darkness]

Imagination is so much harder to face than reality. ~~ Mabel Seeley

A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books. ~~ London Times

Power in the hands of particular groups and classes serves like a prism to refract reality through their own perspective. ~~ Sheila Rowbotham

All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty: for beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love. ~~ Evelyn Underhill

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Reality is the other person's idea of how things should be. ~~ John M. Shanahan

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. ~~ Philip K. Dick

Pain is an energy monster; we give it the power to hurt us. And we can take that power away -- depending on how we choose to view ourselves. All pain is real, but you can change your reality. ~~ David Black

Appearances give us more pleasure than reality, especially when they help to satisfy our egos. ~~ Emile Chevalier

The reality is that many of the changes in science and technology are complex because of the complexity of them. ~~ Barry Jones

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. ~~ D. H. Lawrence

You… must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow. ~~ Luigi Pirandello

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. ~~ T. S. Eliot

Reality is never ideal. We patch up as we go on. We do not create things, they happen, and we cope with them. ~~ Julian Rathbone

Reality is something you rise above. ~~ Liza Minnelli

I saw reality, which is the most powerful of hallucinogens. ~~ Romain Gary

I'm a product of Hollywood. Fantasy is not unnatural to me; it's my reality. Hollywood people are like everyone else, only more so. They depict reality as opposed to living it. ~~ Carrie Fisher

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. ~~ Susan Sontag

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality. ~~ Sir Winston Churchill

We are in a period of transition. We are opening a new page of the history of mankind. Nobody can predict the future. However it may be hoped that the next millennium will see the emergence of a multipolar, multicultural world in which the men will have more opportunity to manifest their creativity. The past is full of violence. Our hope is in the future. Science and technology have to become instruments of cultural diffusion to make this hope a reality. ~~ Viscount Ilya Prigogine

According to [Carl G.] Jung, neurosis followed if either extroversion or introversion became exaggerated. Extreme extroversion led to the individual losing his own identity in the press of people and events. Extreme introversion threatened the subjectively preoccupied individual with loss of contact with external reality. ~~ Anthony Storr [Solitude: A Return to the Self]

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream world into reality. ~~ Theodor Reik

I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, and I'm happy, Doctor. I finally won out over it. ~~ Harvey [film, 1950]

We are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. ~~ M. Scott Peck

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything. ~~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible. ~~ Dr. Karl Menninger

A disturbing possibility exists that the television experience has not merely blurred the distinctions between the real and the unreal for steady viewers, but that by doing so it has dulled their sensitivities to real events. For when the reality of a situation is diminished, people are able to react to it less emotionally, more as spectators. ~~ Marie Winn [The Plug-In Drug]

Reality hasn't the least obligation to be interesting. ~~ Jorge Luis Borges

Surrealism had a great affect on me because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality. ~~ John Lennon

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality. ~~ Adrienne Rich

I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. I can take it in small doses, but as a lifestyle I found it too confining. ~~ Jane Wagner [The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe]

Whenever hope and illusion become the source of the will to live, all knowledge of reality becomes highly threatening, since at any time a new piece of information might remove the grounds for this hope. This is exactly the case now. When life is motivated by hope for improvement, denial of reality is necessarily renewed and fortified. ~~ Christina Thurmer-Rohr

Ours is a culture that emphasizes cure, or, short of that, immediate relief from symptoms, so that we can carry on with our busy lives. Unfortunately, in our cultural denial of the reality of chronic illness and disability, we frequently silence the voices of those who cannot deny it. ~~ Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe [With Wings]

I live in another dimension, but I have a summer home in reality. ~~ Unattributed

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. ~~ Iris Murdoch

The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ~~ Philip K. Dick

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

Fearful as reality is: it is less fearful than evasions of reality. ~~ Caitlin Thomas

To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In competition for prestige it seems only sensible to try to perfect our image rather than ourselves. That seems the most economical, direct way to produce the desired result. Accustomed to live in a world of pseudo-events, celebrities, dissolving forms, and shadowy but overshadowing images, we mistake our shadows for ourselves. To us they seem more real than the reality. Why should they not seem so to others? ~~ Daniel J. Boorstin

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality. ~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be relevant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee. ~~ C. S. Lewis

A vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance. ~~ Spinoza

The attribution of "magical" qualities to particular individuals can be viewed, in one way, as a regression to childhood. It implies the same inability, or refusal, to distinguish reality from unreality. ~~ Andrew Weiner

Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before. ~~ Margaret Halsey

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. ~~ Dylan Thomas

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low. ~~ Aldous Huxley

Education strays from reality when it divides its knowledge into separate compartments without due regard to the connection between them. ~~ Frances Mosmek [Acknowledge the Wonder]

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. ~~ Allen Ginsberg

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. ~~ John W. Gardner

We are selling perception as much as reality. We want to fill a need in the consumer's mind, and it really doesn't matter if the need is real or imagined. ~~ Kevin O'Malley

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye. ~~ Shana Alexander [Talking Woman]

We are pretty sure that we and our pets share the same reality, until one day we come home to find that our wistful, intelligent friend who reminds us of our better self has decided a good way to spend the day is to open a box of Brillo pads, unravel a few, distribute some throughout the house, and eat or wear all the rest. And we shake our heads in an inability to comprehend what went wrong here. ~~ Merrill Markoe [What the Dogs Have Taught Me]

What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movie-like little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story. ~~ Meg Greenfield

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live. ~~ Mary Catherine Bateson

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. ~~ Hermann Hesse

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness. ~~ Martin Esslin

Don't take yourself too seriously, that's incredibly important. Don't start believing what everyone else is saying about you--good or bad. Keep a grip on reality. ~~ Brett Anderson

Reality is frequently inaccurate. ~~ Douglas Adams [The Restaurant at the End of the Universe]

Idealism is fine; but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive. ~~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea. ~~ Lou Dorfsman

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. ~~ Albert Einstein

It takes only in reality one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. ~~ William Ralph Inge

Sometimes you just need to look reality in the eye and deny it. ~~ Garrison Keillor

We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear. ~~ Hussein, King of Jordan

If you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even. ~~ Judith Guest [Ordinary People]

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnections, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person. ~~ Sherry Turkle

Maturity: A stoic response to endless reality. ~~ Carrie Fisher

My hope for the next millennium is that the motto, "E Pluribus Unum" [of many, one] will become a reality for the people of the United States and of the world. ~~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I see nothing wrong with acting out one's dreams, if only to discover that they never had a shred of reality about them. ~~ Amanda Cross [Carolyn Heilbrun]

Perhaps … women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism. ~~ Germaine Greer (see Said Who?)

Reality is a collective hunch. ~~ Mel Seesholtz

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed. ~~ Serge Daney

I'm afraid, sir, you have rather a weak grasp of reality. ~~ The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [film, 1989]

[On his father:] He had the precious gift of being deaf when convenient. Many people took this for absent-mindedness, but it was rather his faculty for concentrating on what suited him… in order to grasp reality better he limited his perceptions to a few definite things. ~~ Jean Renoir

Man is a being who transcends himself and the world. He is a continual protest against reality. ~~ Nicolas Berdyaev

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

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. ~~ Marcus Anneus Seneca

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today. ~~ Octavio Paz

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp. ~~ Ayn Rand

Until a child can meet reality, he must live in fantasy. But he must create his own fantasy. And it is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter. ~~ Marya Mannes [More in Anger]

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

In our society … those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not. ~~ Marya Mannes

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. ~~ James Baldwin

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. ~~ Salman Rushdie

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it. ~~ Tony Hillerman [The Fallen Man]

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully. ~~ Marilyn Ferguson [The Aquarian Conspiracy]

Little children do not distinguish as we do between an inner fantasy and an outer "reality." For them, experience of both kinds has the same quality of actual event. ~~ Miriam Lindstrom