In a world that often feels overwhelming and complex, quotes serve as little nuggets of wisdom that distill profound truths into digestible insights. They have the unique ability to resonate with us, sparking introspection or inspiring action. In this blog post, we've gathered a selection of 79 insightful quotes on reality that offer a variety of perspectives on life as we know it. These quotes, gathered from influential thinkers, philosophers, and writers, invite us to reflect on our perception of reality and consider what shapes our understanding of the world around us. Dive in and explore these thought-provoking gems that might just shift your outlook and elevate your mindfulness.
1. “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” - Jessamyn West
2. “The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.” - Betrand Russell
3. “Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.” - Alan Moore
4. “Fais de ta vie un rêve, et d'un rêve, une réalité.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5. “Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...” - Raymond Chandler
6. “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...” - Bruno Bettelheim
7. “In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.” - Scarlett Thomas
8. “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
9. “I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.” - Lawrence Durrell
10. “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” - André Breton
11. “You get what you give. What you put into things is what you get out of them.” - Jennifer Lopez
12. “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” - Julian Barnes
13. “Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.” - Aberjhani
14. “J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence.” - Anatole France
15. “In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.” - Aleister Crowley
16. “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.” - Virginia Woolf
17. “Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.” - E.H. Gombrich
18. “The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.” - Eugene Ionesco
19. “Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?” - Emilie Autumn
20. “If we knew everything would change we would have turned back but we didn't know. Thats how things happen. Especially sunny days hide dark moments in their pockets.” - Karen Foxlee
21. “Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.” - Christopher Hitchens
22. “At beyond continent of reality, there are oceans of ideas.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]
23. “Life has to go on...............” - Ruby
24. “Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.” - Oscar Wilde
25. “Do you really believe in destiny?" "How can I not believe in destiny, when there is no difference between my memories and my dreams at night? There's no difference between their reality. And if I dream something first, I remember it later when I am actually walking in the place or looking at the person I first dreamed of. Days later. Or years later. Destiny~ she walks with me.” - C. JoyBell C.
26. “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
27. “The clarity of perception makes reality look as it is.” - Toba Beta
28. “And it's his illusions about whatconstitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed” - Luke Rhineheart
29. “It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.” - Jean Genet
30. “To live by worry is to live against reality” - E. Stanley Jones
31. “We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.” - David Eagleman
32. “Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece.” - Steve Maraboli
33. “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
34. “Reality is a projection of your thoughts or the things you habitually think about.” - Stephen Richards
35. “No escape--like life itself.” - Will Weaver
36. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” - Philip K. Dick
37. “All we know is what we're told.” - Ashly Lorenzana
38. “It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.” - Elizabeth Berg
39. “kung alam ko lang na pwersado rin akong magtatrabaho nang ganito, nagsikap na lang sana ako sa eskwelahan nung bata ako. parehas lang naman palang nakakapagod. at least pag nakapag-aral ka, may pag-asa ka pang magkaroon ng magandang kinabukasan at makatulong sa iba.” - Bob Ong
40. “Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.” - Margaret Thatcher
41. “There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations” - Jodi Picoult
42. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.” - Tim Harford
43. “The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.” - Eugene O'Neill
44. “If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.” - Criss Jami
45. “There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.” - Neil Gaiman
46. “As though sensing her heightening alarm, Pinfeathers halted his advance."I can’t help it that I’m susceptible to you," he whispered. "You know that. It’s just that you’re so...unreal...and so I have to touch you. If only to be certain that I’m not the one who’s dreaming. You see, I hear that sort of thing is going around.” - Kelly Creagh
47. “We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.” - Lawrence Durrell
48. “Every guy seems nice until he’s not.” - Claire LaZebnik
49. “But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.” - Paolo Bacigalupi
50. “Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.” - Jennifer Yane
51. “Religion is the subjective experience. Science is the objective reality. To argue either is a ridiculous waste of time and energy.” - Steve Maraboli
52. “Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before.In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?” - Paul Davies
53. “I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.” - Tim O'Brien
54. “If you're waiting for me to declare my undying love for you, I can't do that yet, blood-bond or no blood-bond. If you think I'm the swoony type of heroine you find in romance novels, who'll fall into your arms just because you saved me from an alternate reality or whatever, get ready to leave empty handed, because I don't want to be caught.” - Dianna Hardy
55. “Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.” - Philip K. Dick
56. “The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?” - Vernor Vinge
57. “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
58. “I shook my head, folding my arms around my waist. He was wrong; he was the one offering fairy dust, Peter Pan offering to carry me off to the Neverland of soulfinders and happily ever after. But he was too late. Last night i had to grew up and I now knew that such dreams did not exist; real life was more like living with Captain Hook's mercenary pirates than playing happy families in a treehouse” - Joss Stirling
59. “Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It’s bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.” - Michael Crichton
60. “It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.” - Alain De Botton
61. “Everything we think we know is really only perceived by our senses,' he explains patiently. 'The sounds we hear are just waves in the air; colors are electromagnetic radiation; your sense of taste comes from molecules that match a specific area on your tongue. Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light spectrum, the sky would be green and trees would be red. Some animals see in completely different ways, so who knows what colors look like to them. Nothing is really how we perceive it.” - Wendy Mass
62. “When God plays chess, you will notice that he never has to move a single piece...in order to win.” - Lionel Suggs
63. “There's no reason for any of us to face reality if we don't like it.” - Stephanie Rowe
64. “Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.” - Neal Shusterman
65. “That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.” - Stefanos Livos
66. “Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.” - Thomas Merton
67. “I find that there are a lot of objects and subjects within the world today. There's so much going on, that it seems like reality itself is trying hide something. Not only do we have to deal with illusions that the media, literature, states, governments, religions, and all of the plentiful theatrics of life entrances us with, but we have to deal with reality's false face. People continuously livelife, go to work, play, stress, dance, eat, sleep, and step back into yesterday, not understanding that there are invisible curtains blinding the truth from the surface. Become empty, just for a moment, and ask yourself simple paradoxical questions. Do you know where you are? Do you understand where you are? Do you understand who you are? Do you understand why you are? Gain a sense of glory, by being defeated by your own question, and liberate yourself from the mask that reality has given you since adolescence. However, that is the problem. So many have worn this invisible mask for so long, that they are unable to take it off, and are bound by the illusion that reality wants them to see. Liberation is a goal that you may no longer obtain, but don't worry, for ignorance and deception are your only true friends now. They can carry you to God, but they cannot wake you up.” - Lionel Suggs
68. “I had lots of good intentions but I wasted them on people who didn't deserve them...” - Bellamkonda Avinash Babu
69. “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that i was a butterfly. flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.” - Zhuangzi
70. “How much longer will you sit back and wait for your dream to spontaneously come true? Too many days, weeks, months, and years have passed! Do not be unresponsive to your own dreams. Now, set a course of action that will lead to bringing your dream into reality.” - Steve Maraboli
71. “What we accept as reality is primarily a construction of our imagination.” - Joey Lawsin
72. “…If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.” - Mulk Raj Anand
73. “For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.” - Julian Barnes
74. “YOU DEMAND SALVATION EVEN AS YOU STEAL FROM THE COLLECTION PLATE.YOU SEND FOOD TO THE REFUGEES, AND THEN YOU DON'T ALLOW THE DELIVERY TRUCKS THROUGH THE WARZONES. THE FOOD WILL SPOIL , THE SUPPLIES WILL BE SOLD BY THE VICTORS . THE CIVILIANS WILL STARVE AND SICKEN AND EVENTUALLY DIE. IT IS THE WAY OF THINGS. THEY WILL ALL DIE, WHETHER FROM THE BRUTAL SAVAGERY THAT IS UNIQUE TO MAN OR FROM THE ABUNDANCE OF DISEASE OR FROM THE SCARCITY OF SUSTENANCE.” - Jackie Morse Kessler
75. “It can be heartbreaking when you find out that your fairytale image of the world doesn't match the reality.” - Taylor Swift
76. “The magic that turns dreams into reality is YOU! When you are inspired by a dream, create a good plan; that turns it into a goal. Then, live your life in a way that will bring that dream, that goal, to life. The magic is you.” - Steve Maraboli
77. “This world is better than Utopia because - and follow this point carefully - you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That's the very definition of Utopia.” - Brad Warner
78. “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
79. “The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.” - Shannon L. Alder
