Quotes About Reality

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.

Some dream I had must have mistaken you for God that day.

Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

A book, a poem, a play — they start as fantasms but they end up as things, like a box of crackers or an automobile tire.

once upon a time I used to think that when I got money again I would have a maid and my wife would take it easy. Now I got money, and I got a maid, and my wife is workin' for the maid.

The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

the world is my idea

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?

He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind.

Music is so easy to explain, yet so inexplicable, as it reproduces all the emotions of our inner being without reality, remote from pain.

Bei gleicher Umgebung lebt doch jeder in einer anderen Welt.

we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too.

For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it.

The past and the future (considered apart from the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.