41 Quotes On Facing Reality

In life, facing reality can be one of the most challenging yet liberating experiences. Whether we're dealing with personal setbacks, societal issues, or navigating the complexities of everyday decisions, embracing the truth allows us to grow and transform. This blog post is dedicated to those moments of clarity and courage. We've curated a collection of the top 41 quotes on facing reality to inspire, motivate, and perhaps even challenge your perspectives. Let these wise words from thought leaders, writers, and philosophers guide you through the nuances of confronting the world as it is.

1. “I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it.” - kyoichi katayama

2. “Shoving feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.” - Brad Pitt

3. “If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

4. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” - Cormac McCarthy

5. “Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.” - Orson Scott Card

6. “Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.” - Lao Tzu

7. “Good fiction doesn’t claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice—the way we all know things should be—without suggesting that’s how things really are. Good fiction is the mirage that declares itself a mirage, yet compels us to faith through its beauty. Good fiction is the dream that’s too good to be true, so perfect and symmetrical that it gives itself away every time. But it doesn’t trick you into suspending your disbelief by trying to look anything like reality. Good fiction makes you acutely, painfully aware of your disbelief, and makes you believe anyway. And when it’s done well—when it’s done right—good fiction is more real than reality.” - P.S. Baber

8. “As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.” - Ernst Jünger

9. “...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.” - J.G. Ballard

10. “Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word” - Brenda Ueland

11. “Life has to go on...............” - Ruby

12. “It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.” - Deb Caletti

13. “I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.” - Alan Moore

14. “I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That's what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we'll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn't so, nor will it be made so.” - John M. Ford

15. “Insanity is the ability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.” - Paulo Coelho

16. “George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

17. “In order to survive in a world of instinct,its' alternative is to hunt or being hunted.Reject this, then be prepared to be hunted.” - Toba Beta

18. “When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.” - Jess C. Scott

19. “If"If freckles were lovely, and day was night, And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie, Life would be delight,-- But things couldn't go right For in such a sad plight I wouldn't be I. If earth was heaven and now was hence, And past was present, and false was true, There might be some sense But I'd be in suspense For on such a pretense You wouldn't be you. If fear was plucky, and globes were square, And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee Things would seem fair,-- Yet they'd all despair, For if here was there We wouldn't be we.” - E.E. Cummings

20. “it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.” - Khaled Hosseini

21. “Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.” - Grant Morrison

22. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” - Herbert Stein

23. “Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?” - Jeanette Winterson

24. “I don't know what I need, or even what I want, from her or from anybody. There's no way to tell her the truth, because the truth is that my heart is broken, and I don't think there''s any chance of it being sewn back together. This is permanent. It can't be fixed.” - Hannah Harrington

25. “You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.” - Warren Buffett

26. “Your opinion is not my reality.” - Steve Maraboli

27. “Thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.” - Michelle Hodkin

28. “kuhang-kuha natin ang mga katarantaduhan ng hollyeood, pero hindi ang kaunting pagiging responsable ng mga kanluraning bansa sa isyu ng pagtayo sa sariling paa.” - Bob Ong

29. “I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.” - Anthony Bourdain

30. “When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.” - Stephen Hawking

31. “Yet 'Reality' is just whatever illusion we believe in” - Fola

32. “Beauty begins in the eyes of the beholder; Reality ends in the mind of the observer.” - Joey Lawsin

33. “Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.” - Zhuangzi

34. “Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.” - Vernor Vinge

35. “His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.” - Dan Simmons

36. “For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.” - William F. Buckley Jr.

37. “Life is better than any movie or TV show. In real life there is no plot and there are billions of characters.” - Marc Pamittan

38. “The wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,To dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.Oh wise men, riddle me this: What if the dream come true?” - Pádraig Pearse

39. “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and more and have our being.” - James W. Sire

40. “There's nowhere else to escape to ... Except in a wooden box, that is.” - H.M. Forester

41. “It's amusing to me that we refer to people who live in their heads as detached, disturbed, or mad, when reality for anyone is actually a matter of the individual's state of mind. The mad truth—all people live in their heads. Whatever you think life is, it is.” - Richelle E. Goodrich