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 you do reality you have to be pretty careful. You have to almost monitor yourself to make sure that you don't get yourself in situations that you shouldn't [be in]. But at the same time I kind of find that exciting because I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie."
"In my own experience, both personally and professionally, I've learned that you don't wait to confront reality. It doesn't get easier. It doesn't get better. And, in some cases, if you don't get the relevant information from people and act quickly, you start losing options. You're into damage control."
"The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view."
"Unfortunately, too many executives believe the myths about trust. Myths like how trust is soft and is merely a social virtue. The reality is that trust is hard-edged and is an economic driver."
"IBM has had a long partnership with Siebel, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft, so from a partner perspective, this is a good move by both sides. This agreement reflects the reality of what customers expect for their investment, support and openness. Oracle really needed to do this for Websphere, but it opens up tremendous opportunities for both companies."
"Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality)."
"Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [...] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches."
"Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went."
"Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while."
"At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on."
"We need to keep our ears open to the realities of life. If we don't act on life and take action to make things happen, it will act on us and give us results we might not want."
"We hate to be cheering for high gas prices. The reality is that's what's happening."
"We have a lot of respect and love for Bruschi. But he's gone. That's unfortunate for us, but we have to move on. Just like if I got injured they'd have to move on without me. That's just part of the game. That's reality."
"The reality is that these cases are happening all the time. It's when they get out of control that you have a problem."
"We're looking for something that sounds like a member of the Republican Party. The reality is, he's playing for the Democratic vote at this point ... but he has to give something to create energy among conservatives."
"To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It's commenting or observing or twisting life."
"What people that are professionals in the art world - both in literature and the other arts - always try to do is to recognize the feasibility of making the transition from the particular to the general - to make the transition from the portrait of one postman - to take Van Gogh, for example, to something that is every postman. That synecdotal transition that most selfies don't make. But we who live in this world, and not simply in our private realities, understand that that's the transition our art has to make."
"...I believe that it is not enough, as I said, to tinker at the margins of U.S. immigration law... the United States must institute comprehensive reforms that conform to the realities of the era in which we live."
"Hope remains the highest reality, the age-old power."
"Meaningful work, not welfare, is every American's hope, and we have a continuing responsibility to make those hopes a lasting reality."
