quotations about reality
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
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
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"
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
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
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us.
LEENA KROHN
"Cracking the Codes of Leena Krohn", The New Yorker, January 13, 2016
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
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
The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
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
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
O the heart has dreams Elysian!
That steal o'er it calm and sweet,
Hushing pain like a magician
Who binds spirits at his feet.
WALTER RICHARD CASSELS
"Reality", Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul and Other Poems
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Reality is subject to the mind's creation.
DIANE STEIN
Essential Reiki
Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?
GEORGE BERKELEY
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come