Real quotes
21.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain."
"You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people."
"It was Schopenhauer who made me a philosopher. Real philosophy, I told my appalled colleagues at Auckland, is about sex, death, and boredom. Since then I have expanded my horizons, but I have always retained an affection for the sage of Frankfurt."
"I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life."
"The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement."
"Real separation, to me, is the death of love. Any other - parting - well, it just isn't real."
"Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature."
"The love of liberty that is not a real principle of dutiful behavior to authority is as hypocritical as the religion that is not productive of a good life."
"I'd never even sung in the shower, I'm too mortified. But once I got over the initial fear it was kind of enjoyable. Sondheim's melodies and lyrics are a real pleasure to tromp around in, it's really beautiful stuff."
"The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice."
"There is a very real evil consequent on ascribing supernatural origin to the received maxilms of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized."
"The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption."
"Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches."
"Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them."
"You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person."
"Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses."
"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence."
"Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."
"I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to."
"A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer."
