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.
"Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die."
"No one looks back and regrets leaving this world. What's regretted is how real we thought it was."
"If your knowledge of fire has been turned to certainty by words alone, then seek to be cooked by the fire itself. Don't abide in borrowed certainty. There is no real certainty until you burn; if you wish for this, sit down in the fire."
"You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life."
"Friendship that insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the name. Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences, however sharp they be."
"If you want real peace in the world, start with children."
"No man has a chance to enjoy permanent success until he begins to look in a mirror for the real cause of all his mistakes."
"I think school is so much harder than real life. People are so much more accepting when they are adults."
"Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals."
"I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life."
"There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger."
"A real businessman or entrepreneur has no enemies. Once he understand this, the sky's the limit."
"Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does."
"To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them."
"The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality."
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand."
"The Four Reliances. First, rely on the spirit and meaning of the teachings, not on the words; Second, rely on the teachings, not on the personality of the teacher; Third, rely on real wisdom, not superficial interpretation; And fourth, rely on the essence of your pure Wisdom Mind, not on judgmental perceptions."
"Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
"Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness."
"Nothings ever real until its real."
