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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"What I found was an emotional consistency with him. The words, the scenes, the situations - I wasn't mimicking what I thought Branch Rickey's emotional reality would have been."
"I manifested in a dreamlike way to dreamlike beings and gave a dreamlike Dharma, but in reality I never taught and never actually came."
"The self of which you speak, whether it is the great self or the small self, is only a concept that does not correspond to any reality."
"As pathetic as it was, she'd rather hold on to the possibility of something perfect than be hit with the reality of nothing much."
"One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from."
"Puerto Rican independence movement wasn't just rooted in some sort of personal intransigence or some passionate Latino temperament. It was rooted in economic and political reality at the time. It also made sense since the founding principles of the United States are supposedly based on government by the consent of the governed, and the sense that all men are created equal."
"When you enter deeply into this moment, you see the nature of reality, and this insight liberates you from suffering and confusion. Peace is already there to some extent: the problem is whether we know how to touch it."
"I know that we do not know enough. We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality."
"When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us."
"He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life."
"Opinionum enim commenta delet dies; naturæ judicia confirmat. Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded on reality."
"I was in theater when I was in elementary, middle school and high school. I didn't know it would be an actual profession for me. I didn't think of it as a reality."
"The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow."
"I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better - time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality."
"The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything."
"What I see of the US Presidential elections from down here makes me want to disengage from that particular reality and just hole up and read. It's true. I think if I were living in the US, I would just turn my television and radio off for a year right now, and just read."
"There's a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don't feel so distant from political reality there. When things happen, they almost seem to happen on a Shakespearian stage with the audience so close they can become actors too. This is partly what Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote that small countries have big politics."
"Today's dialogue has succeeded in reinforcing the need for international partnerships and cooperation in tackling the reality of climate change."
"It is a reality. People are being victimized or are being targeted to be victims each and every day."
"The poet resists the pressures of reality, including the pressures of violence, in making, in forming, the poem. The tension is in the resistance - the poem is an act of resistance."
