Reality quotes
10.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside reality — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals."
"In Iraq, four American soldiers have been arrested and charged with stealing a million dollars cash. After hearing about it the Fox network announced plans for a new reality show called 'GI Joe Millionaire.'"
"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."
"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."
"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
"The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them."
"He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it."
"What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
"It doesn't count if your swing is going the highest if you're getting pushed."
"Oil runs America and it's the sad reality."
"I don't know how everybody else feels, but I just long for reality rather than these made-up things."
"If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him."
"At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,--inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away."
"The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality."
"Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality."
"People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way."
"Reality television, anybody can be a star at any minute."
"What harm is there in dreaming, if it eases pain? What good is reality, if it blots out hope? Can a man's mind be washed without bleaching his soul?"
"I don't know where hell is ... another dimension, perhaps, or another plane of reality. As for getting there ... it's a choice between sinning and being tricked by demons It's a plane of evil ... despair ... and magic of the foulest kind."
"Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere."
