Quotes About Reality

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.

A picture you hold long enough in your head becomes your reality..

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.

Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.

If you would write the truth, you must first become the truth.

Stock market bubbles don't grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by a misconception.

Politicians will respect, rather than manipulate, reality only if the public cares about the truth and punishes politicians when it catches them in deliberate deception.

If the cognitive function operated in isolation, without any interference from the manipulative function, it could produce knowledge. Knowledge is represented by true statements. A statement is true if it corresponds to the facts. But if the manipulative function is at work, the facts no longer serve as an independent criterion of truth.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually dependable, but at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth. For a child, that sweetness, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

With each post or tweet, we choose what to keep private and what to make public, what face to show the world and what to keep buried. It is a kind of deception, and we have become reality stars, every one of us.

I imagine sarcasm to be a backward slanting font, each word leaning away from rather than into the next. These days it is getting harder and harder to tell reality from distortion, truth from satire, especially on the Internet.