Reality Quotes

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

~ Malcolm Muggeridge

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

~ Donald R. Prothero

The truth feels like it hurts, yet actually it builds. A lie feels like it builds, yet actually it hurts.

~ Moffat Machingura

The world is full of opinions. But I am not searching for opinions, I'm searching for truths.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

~ Salman Rushdie

Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real?

~ Emma Donoghue

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems.  It is an escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me. Reading in some wonderful ways helps me find out who I am. When she was a young girl Patricia MacLachlan's mother encouraged her to read a book and find out who you are. And it is true that in some ways reading defines me as it refines me. Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality. I read to feel life.

~ Gladys M. Hunt

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

~ Ralph Ellison

Sometimes it takes a miracle to remind us that the only permanent condition is that of impermanence.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Time itself is only as real as your own mental discrimination between the revelation and concealment of the one Light.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

All stories are born out of illusion, but that doesn't mean they're not worth telling.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Living a horror movie cliché, so to speak?” Caleb softly replied. “I know this is hard to comprehend, especially since we study science and things that are proven or explainable. But, all my life I’ve been on the road to this very place.” He pointed downwards with his index finger for effect. “Many things I’ve personally seen keep leading me to the same conclusion. In reality, the impossible doesn’t exist.

~ Davee Jones

Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

When a man showed up you didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at yours, because it's painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it may be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

~ Ken Kesey

We can't always have our druthers.

~ Harper Lee

God made the world like a knife. We have the choice to take it by the handle or the blade.

~ C.j. Langenhoven

Physical reality is one of the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies.

~ Thaddeus Golas

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

~ Lillian Hellman

We live in an incredibly dynamic universe that gives us what we wish for, like a waking dream

~ Cynthia Sue Larson

There was no going back to the way things were, because all you ever got was the way things are.

~ Sarah Ockler

For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.

~ William F. Buckley Jr.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

~ Orhan Pamuk

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

~ Richard Dawkins

What we accept as reality is primarily a construction of our imagination.

~ Joey Lawsin

The reason that everyone has their own problem is everyone sees something in different side.

~ Jessica Patricia

Don’t listen to the ramblings of fools,” he said, smiling grimly. “When it comes down to it, if they knew the truth, no one would want to live on this earth forever.

~ Melika Dannese Lux

I’ve read about this in books, imagined it in my mind countless times since I’ve been here, but to actually witness it is something entirely different. I thought I was prepared, but nothing—no amount of book learning or supposed life experience or bravado—can make you invulnerable to the sight of a vampire drinking blood.

~ Melika Dannese Lux

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

~ Francesca Lia Block

In between trash and treasure.

~ Raditya Dika

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.

~ Czesław Miłosz

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Life is better than any movie or TV show. In real life there is no plot and there are billions of characters.

~ Marc Pamittan

The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality. Once you do that, you'll be clear enough to deal with what's left.

~ Michael Singer

The intellect seeks to throw its own interpretation of the real over reality, and in so doing carves the world up into artificial little cubes.

~ James Rozoff

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Reality is what one makes it. And the more negative reality one nurtures and creates, the more of it one has.

~ Benjamin Hoff

As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people's perceptions. If there's 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven't been caught yet, you tell yourself you're still a birthday clown, and that's how you keep doing it.

~ Dan Harmon

Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the sense. When I'm speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out load, I'm speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.Mentars also make models, but they don't apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality.

~ David Marusek

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

~ David Foster Wallace

I find that there are a lot of objects and subjects within the world today. There's so much going on, that it seems like reality itself is trying hide something. Not only do we have to deal with illusions that the media, literature, states, governments, religions, and all of the plentiful theatrics of life entrances us with, but we have to deal with reality's false face. People continuously livelife, go to work, play, stress, dance, eat, sleep, and step back into yesterday, not understanding that there are invisible curtains blinding the truth from the surface. Become empty, just for a moment, and ask yourself simple paradoxical questions. Do you know where you are? Do you understand where you are? Do you understand who you are? Do you understand why you are? Gain a sense of glory, by being defeated by your own question, and liberate yourself from the mask that reality has given you since adolescence. However, that is the problem. So many have worn this invisible mask for so long, that they are unable to take it off, and are bound by the illusion that reality wants them to see. Liberation is a goal that you may no longer obtain, but don't worry, for ignorance and deception are your only true friends now. They can carry you to God, but they cannot wake you up.

~ Lionel Suggs