Quotes About Reality

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.' – Book 3, Chapter 16

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

Steadfast Seas and MountainsThe lofty mountains and the seas, Being mountains, being seas, Both exist and are real. But frail as flowers are the lives of men, Passing phantoms of this world.

Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.

I mean, Rick James was just a man-made image, the image I created. Just trying to live Rick James almost killed me.

Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me.

When I come upon a man who has a gleaming, empty, clear desktop, I am dealing with a fellow who is so far removed from the realities of his business that someone else is running it for him.

I'm really boring, man. Like, I'm really dull. And I think people may think that I have this glamorous, fun lifestyle, but it's pretty dull. But that's what I like.

This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.

When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.

The man, with his brain, can pierce the intoxicating mirage of things and contemplate a frozen universe in the most perfect indifference to him and his dreams.

It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.

We have great power to see the truth when the truth is all we wish to see; but what is easier than to credit what we desire? and can a man deceive anyone so easily as himself?

A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."

Man usually believes, if only words he hears, That also with them goes material for thinking. [Ger., Gewohnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hort, Es musse sich dabei doch auch was denken.]

If all be a Dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the Question; and so it is not much matter that a waking Man should answer him.

There is no lie that a man will not believe; and there is no man who does not believe many lies; and there is no man who believes only lies.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.