47 Insightful Reality Quotes

In the whirlwind of daily life, it's often easy to lose sight of reality's profound lessons. Insightful reality quotes can serve as powerful reminders, offering wisdom and clarity. These words, penned by great thinkers, leaders, and philosophers, have the ability to cut through the noise, encouraging us to reflect, reassess, and realign with our true selves. Our curated collection of 47 quotes invites you on a journey of introspection and understanding, providing an opportunity to explore diverse perspectives and timeless truths. Dive in and find the inspiration you need to navigate life's complexities with greater insight and clarity.

1. “Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.” - Robin Williams

2. “It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.” - Anthony Burgess

3. “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.” - Henry David Thoreau

4. “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

5. “It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.” - James Connolly

6. “I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.” - Christopher Pike

7. “In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.” - Scarlett Thomas

8. “The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.” - Darren Shan

9. “You can't just wish change; you have to live the change in order for it to become a reality.” - Steve Maraboli

10. “It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.” - Philip K. Dick

11. “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

12. “I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.” - Diane Setterfield

13. “At beyond continent of reality, there are oceans of ideas.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

14. “Liking is more important than loving. It lasts. I want what is between us to last, Luke. I don't want us just to love each other and marry and get tired of each other and then want to marry some one else.""Oh! my dear Love, I know. You want reality. So do I. What's between us will last for ever because it's founded on reality.” - Agatha Christie

15. “The average Bhutanese knows much more about the world than the average American...(for Americans)It is more comfortable to watch fake news about celebrities than to know what's happening in China or southern Sudan. But events happening in China or Sudan affect us so much more because they are real.” - Linda Leaming

16. “The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …” - John Ashbery

17. “How are you feeling, man?" he asks me."Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder."Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here."I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive."I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is.” - Michael Cunningham

18. “Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.” - Anne Carson

19. “No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.” - Anne Rice

20. “This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.” - Théophile Gautier

21. “Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.” - John Green

22. “إن جرائد الصباح تثير أعصابى...هذا صحيح.و لكن لا مانع عندى أن تثور كل يوم.إنها جهزت و أعدت لهذا الغرض وحده,لأن تتوتر,و تثور,و تتحفز,و تتوثب..تنتبه.” - مصطفى محمود

23. “We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It's time to put an end to this. It's time for us to let ourselves be loved.” - C. JoyBell C.

24. “All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.” - Criss Jami

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

26. “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

27. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.” - Tim Harford

28. “Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.” - Arthur Schnitzler

29. “I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)--from "Mad Girl's Love Song: A Villanelle", written 1954” - Sylvia Plath

30. “Don't become a prisoner of your own reality, set yourself free by creating a life worth living.” - Steven Redhead

31. “For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I'm only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn't know: I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point- the only point- is to find things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.” - Lauren Oliver

32. “If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.” - Emil Cioran

33. “Ever have a dream so real you felt you could reach out and touch it?” - Doug Dillon

34. “Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.” - Francis Parker Yockey

35. “It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time.” - Shreve Stockton

36. “The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.” - Richard Dawkins

37. “You can't change reality -- only its perception.” - Lionel Suggs

38. “Good enough never is” - Debbi Fields

39. “What you call life is but a dream, and reality is relative.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

40. “If you know something is an illusion, why pretend it is reality?” - Lionel Suggs

41. “Let stuff simply unfold, for once in your life, without spinning all those hopeful romantic fantasies. The less time you spend dreaming up a world of happily ever after, the more time you’ll have to actually live — no evers or afters required.” - Abby McDonald

42. “Don't let other people's opinions distort your reality. Be true to yourself. Be bold in pursuing your dreams. Be unapologetically you!” - Steve Maraboli

43. “Promise creates a multitude of heartbreaks.” - Darmie Orem

44. “Can't look at the damage that's been done, it's not healthy. Have to look ahead of it. Can't change what I've done, only what I'm gonna do.” - Jordan Ghere

45. “Most of us spend life in a trance. Only those who bridge the gap between reality and dreams succeed.” - Saru Singhal

46. “What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder.” - John Williams

47. “If you argue with reality, you will only cause yourself pain. However if you accept reality and build on it, the things you create will be durable, true, and healing.” - Steve Maraboli