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.
"Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots."
"What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers."
"It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else."
"I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now."
"We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers."
"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."
"Real gangster-ass Nerdfighters don't run from nothing... 'cause real gangster-ass Nerdfighters can't run fast."
"But pizza was originally Italian, although, Italian pizza doesn't taste much like this because this pizza is fortified with sodium. Which is a mineral...or a vitamin. All I know is that it's good for you."
"Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."
"You're only awake when you realise you're awake and when you're dreaming, it is just as real, whatever happens is just as real - whether you actually do die in a dream or fulfil whatever you're doing in a dream, it's, there's nobody to tell me it isn't as real as this now, because how do you know?"
"In 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me - a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko."
"Love is real, real is love."
"I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything."
"The advent of the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s made it very plain crystal clear to me that we had an obligation to do what we could to make real the Constitution of the United States of America."
"I got to see first hand what he has done to make this a reality. That has been real rewarding to watch him achieve his dream."
"'Allen Gregory' came about because we wanted an animated show and we were just tossing around some ideas about me playing a 7-year-old. We thought that would be cool, because we couldn't do that in real life."
"When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him."
"Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied."
"We built [socialistic society] for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks."
"Real intimacy is only possible to the degree that we can be honest about what we are doing and feeling."
