Reality quotes
10.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside reality — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated, sitting in my own crap and urine - this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward."
"Political leaders in Illinois kicked the can down the road, raised taxes, and ignored fiscal realities. Now, they're realizing the consequences of their actions: credit downgrades and negative outlooks."
"Washington, or as I like to call it, 68 square miles surrounded by reality."
"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. [We must learn to control and focus the force of our imagination on the good, bright side so it is positive and constructive helping ourselves and others, rather than let its force focus on the bad, dark side so it is negative and destructive hurting ourselves and others!]"
"If you become so frightened of realities that are not your own, if you take upon yourselves tragedies that do not exist in your reality, in your moment, then you weaken your position and weaken the position, of those you think you are helping. You look about you and you see only hopelessness and helplessness. You organize your reality according to the tragedies of the newspapers!"
"In your system of reality you are learning what mental energy is, and how to use it. You do this by constantly transforming your thought and emotions into physical form. You are supposed to get a clear picture of your inner development by perceiving the exterior environment. What seems to be a perception, an objective concrete event independent from you, is instead the materialization of your own inner emotions, energy, and mental environment."
"You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore you should examine these carefully. If you do not like some aspect of your world, then examine your own expectations."
"Forget the cringing selves you sometimes are and remember, instead, the magic essence of your own being that sings even now through your fingertips. That is the reality which you are seeking. Experience it fully."
"Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love? That is reality. That is the truth. What we make of it is up to us, as the painting of the sunrise is up to the artist. In our world humanity has strayed from that love. It lives hatred and power struggles and manipulations of the earth itself for its own narrow reasons. Continue and no one will see the sunrise. The sunrise will always exist, of course, but people on earth will know nothing of it and finally even stories of its beauty will fade from our knowing."
"I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved."
"I watch every reality show out there."
"I've always been kind of an escape artist. I think that I thought the day-to-day reality of things was unbearably flat."
"The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving."
"I think sometimes when it comes to sports, and especially relationships between players and coaches, that people lose track, lose a sense of reality."
"Every action is either strong or weak, and when every action is strong we are successful."
"Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish."
"Andrew is an integral part of the team and he is staying at my football club. The reality is I need him to score the goals that will get us promoted."
"We are all so preoccupied with ourselves. How can I get happy, how can I find the job I love, how can I become a millionaire, how can lose weight. Yet, the reality is that fulfillment, success and all of these good things comes from trying to help those that we care about to achieve those things."
"I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to."
"The reality is that until we can agree on a formula that reduces tariffs globally we cannot meet this Doha promise for development. In order to keep momentum post-Hong Kong, the European Union must be willing to move."
