Quotes About Reality

art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is

People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed.

What it is, I can not tell; I only know it is not that which the young fool calls it, still less that which the old sinner thinks it.

our imagination is made to mirror truth; all the things that appear in it are more or less after the model of things that are; I suspect it is the region whence issues prophecy; and when we are true it will mirror nothing but truth.

no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God that could have no existence.

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.

You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Does Big Brother exist? Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party. Does he exist in the same way as I exist? You do not exist.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.