Real quotes
21.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside real — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"There is no real limit to how much better a person who really commits to getting better can get. Every manager has the potential to become an excellent manager for the rest of his or her career."
"Knowledge and know-how are the real sources of value and riches. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself."
"I mean, look, I wear makeup in films. I don't wear makeup in real life. It's just part of the gig, that's all."
"To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work."
"And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers."
"If you are mentally somewhere else, you miss real life"
"I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age."
"There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying."
"If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation."
"I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed."
"I believe that the first step in the setting of a real external world is the formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various kinds."
"For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him."
"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the "Old One." I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice."
"On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."
"What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?"
"With the Cuban presence in Namibia it was possible to achieve the security and real freedom of that country and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, with the modest contribution of the international military presence in Africa."
"It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless."
"Without reflecting that this is the only moment in which you can study character," said the count; "on the steps of the scaffold death tears off the mask that has been worn through life, and the real visage is disclosed."
"Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned."
"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay."
