quotations about reality
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The most exciting thing for me is crossing that bridge between something we know is real and something that is extraordinary. The thing for me has always been how you cross that bridge.
J. J. ABRAMS
interview, The Fresno Bee, December 16, 2015
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us.
LEENA KROHN
"Cracking the Codes of Leena Krohn", The New Yorker, January 13, 2016
Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
What is reality? Is it not merely a term for the philosopher to conjure with, behind which he may craftily conceal his ignorance?
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
If you know how much reality is getting in, then you know a great deal about what a person sees to be true.
DAVID J. LIEBERMAN
You Can Read Anyone
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.
ANATOL RAPOPORT
Science and the Goals of Man: a study in semantic orientation
At the end of the day, reality is what's left when all enhanced realities are put away. It used to be easier to tell the difference--art, film, music, playstations--all of these enhanced realities were limited in their means and scope such that they could distract from, inform, communicate with, but not substitute for reality. Now technology has advanced and has become so integral to our personal and social lives that the line between enhanced reality and reality reality is blurred. Devices have become real extensions of our physical body in the virtual reality we've created for ourselves.
AMANDA KNOX
"Amanda's View: Reality is Better", Ballard News Tribune
Where is reality?... It is something dark and dramatic that is present but cannot be grasped for it has no visible form and, therefore, can be neither described nor represented. Reality ... is not to be found in description but in a certain underlying mood. It mysteriously appears when bidden by a call of the political order. Once that summons is made, reality appears.
JOSÉ MARÍA MORENO GALVÁN
attributed, "Nauru: What Reality is This?", Counterpunch, January 22, 2016
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, As Time Goes By: Living in the Sixties with John Lennon
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
Whatever reality is, it's not that.
HERMAN NORTHROP FRYE
The Anatomy of Criticism
Without poetry, reality is speechless.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
These days even reality has to look artificial.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis