Reality Quotations

Woody Allen

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Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.

- Woody Allen

Unknown Author

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After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history.

- Unknown Author

How do we know that the sky is not green and we are all colour-blind?

- Unknown Author

I have a very firm grasp on reality! I can reach out and strangle it any time!

- Unknown Author

Okay, who put a "stop payment" on my reality check?

- Unknown Author

One bright day in the middle of night two dead boys rose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another. A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

- Unknown Author

Reality bites... and doesn't let go.

- Unknown Author

Reality is a palette that humans paint on to let themselves sleep better at night.

- Unknown Author

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

- Unknown Author

Francis Bacon

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The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

- Francis Bacon

Daniel J. Boorstin

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There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

- Daniel J. Boorstin

Jorge Luis Borges

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Reality is not always probable, or likely.

- Jorge Luis Borges

Philip K. Dick

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Norman Douglas

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How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!

- Norman Douglas

Albert Einstein

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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

- Albert Einstein

T.S. Eliot

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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

- T.S. Eliot

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

- T.S. Eliot

M.C. Escher

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Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

- M.C. Escher

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

- M.C. Escher

Sigmund Freud

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Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

- Sigmund Freud

Neil Gaiman

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

- Neil Gaiman

John Kenneth Galbraith

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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Mahatma Gandhi

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An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Few people have the imagination for reality.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Samuel Johnson

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No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

- Samuel Johnson

Garrison Keillor

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I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

- Garrison Keillor

Henry Kissinger

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The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

- Henry Kissinger

John Lennon

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Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

- John Lennon

Abraham Lincoln

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How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

- Abraham Lincoln

Lewis Mumford

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What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

- Lewis Mumford

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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There are no facts, only interpretations.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Eleanor Perényi

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Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting.

- Eleanor Perényi

Pablo Picasso

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Everything you can imagine is real.

- Pablo Picasso

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

- Pablo Picasso

Marcel Proust

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All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

- Marcel Proust

John Steinbeck

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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

- John Steinbeck

Lily Tomlin

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Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.