Quotes About Reality

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.

It's not a dream, But the reality that makes our passion As a lamp shadow—no—no lamp, the sun. What the world's million lips are thirsting for Must be substantial somewhere...

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet. BELIEF

Fellow-wanderer, Could we but mix ourselves into a dream, Not in its image on the mirror!

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.

So I wish you first a Sense of theatre; only Those who love illusion And know it will go far: Otherwise we spend our Lives in a confusion Of what we say and do with Who we really are.

We would rather die in dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let our illusions die.

Let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

The great vice of our age […] is that we are all not only 'actors' but know that we are ('reduplicated Hamlets'), and that it is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it, that our real feelings break through.

My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...

And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did.

But ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie: And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them.

we trust without giving it a thought that we will always see it as we see it once and that what we know is only a moment of what is ours and will stay we believe it as the moment slips away as lengthening shadows merge in the valley and a window kindles there like a first star what we see again comes to us in secret

Everything that does not need you is real

what I live for I can seldom believe in

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.