Quotes About Reality

Life happens at the level of events, not words.

It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to.

We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them.

Suffering is also one of the ways of knowing you're alive.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

What you don't see with your eyes, don't invent with your tongue.

Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains.

The greatest American superstition is belief in facts.

Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream.

The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls, but in the space within to be lived in.

Every story has three sides to it - yours, mine and the facts.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Better a living beggar than a buried emperor.

I refuse to admit I'm more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.

What is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place.

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad, but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports that myth.

Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is, instead of as it should be.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

Half the work that is done in the world is to make things appear what they are not.