Quotes About Reality

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

Now is all we have. Everything that has ever happened to you, and anything that is ever going to happen to you, is just a thought.

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.

It gives me great strength to know that half the people I meet are below average.

My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone, I build My castles in the air.

Man can only receive what he sees himself receiving.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.

Alas! another instance of the triumph of hope over experience.

If wishes were horses, beggars might ride.

I know lots more old drunks than old doctors.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

Fair words butter no parsnips.

Since the concepts people live by are derived only from perceptions and from language and since the perceptions are received and interpreted only in light of earlier concepts, man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

This world's a bubble.

Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.

But in this world nothing is sure but death and taxes.

Such stuff the world is made of.

If all the world must see the world As the world the world hath seen, Then it were better for the world That the world had never been.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age.