Reality quotes

Reality

10.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

10.1K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside reality — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Reality quotes (page 119 of 507)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it -- let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?"

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art."

Read quote 3 likes
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist, Philosopher, Poet
Reality

"The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us."

Read quote 3 likes
Ram Dass Spiritual Teacher, Author
Reality

"If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing."

Read quote 3 likes
Teju Cole Author, Photographer
Reality

"The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect."

Read quote 3 likes
Teju Cole Author, Photographer
Reality

"The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel."

Read quote 3 likes
Teju Cole Author, Photographer
Reality

"It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now."

Read quote 3 likes
Tennessee Williams Playwright
Reality

"Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance."

Read quote 3 likes
Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
Reality

"One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain...The human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body, and we don't 'imagine' anything. We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence."

Read quote 3 likes
Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
Reality

"The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads."

Read quote 3 likes