quotations about reality
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
True reality is what we experience when all the perception is set aside. For instance, when we go to Yellowstone National Park and we are looking at the beautiful mountain covered with snow and we are in awe of its beauty, in that instance we are experiencing reality. We are not thinking about anything but rather are just experiencing. When we start to put some thought to our experience, that is when it becomes perception rather than true reality. That is when the perception becomes skewed because we are relating our past experiences to an interpretation of the present experience.
RODNEY GROVES
Stepping Stones to Personal Empowerment
Under each station of the real,
another glimmers.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes"
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
PAUL BRADFORD
The Dungeonmaster
Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Joy: The Surrender to the Body and to Life
What reality? Is it such a precious goal? Or would it be sometimes better to bathe in the luxurious waters of falseness? To shut away the harshness of truth.
NICHOLAS MARTIN
"Reality", Poems of Reality
Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it is that we have discovered so far. It has appeared that, if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object. Thus what we directly see and feel is merely 'appearance', which we believe to be a sign of some 'reality' behind. But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Appearance and Reality", The Problems of Philosophy
A new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Chaos & Cyber Culture
Tomorrow changes the face of reality.
PHILIP JOSE FARMER
The Lovers
Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace
Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Reality teems with disappointment for him whose sources of enjoyment spring only in the Elysium of Fancy.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Zingers
If the true and ultimate reality is unknowable all reality is unknowable; what we take for reality is merely phenomenon, and what we take for knowledge is merely illusion.
SAMUEL HARRIS
The Philosophical Basis of Theism
Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.
BRUCE LEE
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.
ALAN MOORE
What Is Reality?
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Our focus is our reality. What we choose to focus on becomes our world. It produces our thoughts, values, attitudes, and beliefs.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
Make Peace With Anyone