Quotes About Reality

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

I swear . . . if you existed I'd divorce you.

When you're a kid you use the [pornographic playing] cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.

George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf…Martha: I… am… George… I am.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. —Pablo Picasso

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

I will believe him to have been a very respectable man, who only spoke the truth when he boasted of his power to be in two places at the same time." "Is that so difficult?" said the old gentleman; "if so, you have never dreamed!

Ron fut frappé par le contraste qui régnait entre les coulisses de la justice avec leurs cages à barreaux d'arrière-cour et la solennité très digne de la salle du tribunal. Le public voyait l'édifice, pas les communs.

Poor Jerry. He's giving all of himself to something he's got to loose. -So does everybody...sooner or later. -Freeze on that. -On what? -On all that heavy philosophy bullshit. I'm talking about here and now and everyday important things that people live by. If you extrapolate everything-nothing matters.

Gatsby was great, but most unlikely. Gatsby was too unreal. Although I thought Fitzgerald wrote as well as any American novelist in the twentieth century, Gatsby was as far from truth as Fu Manchu. He was too soft to be what he was storied to be. Gatsby might be a cat burglar, but Gatsby was definitely not a gangster. He lacked the force of will to compel tough men to his bidding simply by force of will. He failed another test; he was too weak for a broad.

I suffer from Irish-Catholic guilt. Guilt is a good reality check. It keeps that 'do what makes you happy' thing in check.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

The term fraud alludes to a saying of the Buddha which the Mahayanists were fond of quoting: "All conditioned things are worthless, unsubstantial, fraudulent, deceptive and unreliable, but only fools are deceived by them. Nirvana alone, the highest reality, is free from deception." Two classes of facts are here distinguished-the deceptive multiple things on one side, and the true reality of the Absolute on the other.

I have said that the philosophy of nature is concerned with the most general features of empirical and material reality. Other expositions written from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view often characterize the field instead as concerned with changeable reality (though some earlier writers do characterize it the way I have, e.g. Bittle 1941, p. 13).

And one way the Aristotelian philosopher of nature might defend the reality of change against his rivals is precisely by appealing to the nature of the material reality that both sides affirm, and arguing that it entails the possibility of change.

God is real, unless declared integer.

Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, nor does form differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form.

That's the way the cookie crumbles.

I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.

I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake.