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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"Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy."
"I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality."
"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final."
"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
"Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency."
"I say 'Out' to every negative thought that comes to my mind. No person, place, or thing has any power over me, for I am the only thinker in my mind. I create my own reality and everyone in it."
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
"Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?"
"Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns"
"There should be a spirit of dialogue. Whenever we see any disagreements, we must think how to solve them on the basis of recognition of oneness of the entire humanity. This is the modern reality."
"Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience."
"In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving."
"The material body has a practical reality that is accessible. It is here and now, and we can do something with it. However, we must not forget that the innermost part of our being is also trying to help us. It wants to come out to the surface and express itself."
"The most powerful state for a human to be in is the state of embracing completely the reality of what is - Now. It is to say "Yes" to life, which is now and always now. There is a vast power in that "Yes," that state of inner non-resistance to what is."
"Cross-cultural reality testing forces people to examine both their own and others' understandings of reality. Most people simply assume that the way they look at things is the way things really are, and judge other cultures' views of reality before understanding them. These judgments are based on ethnocentrism, which closes the door to further understanding and communication. Furthermore, ethnocentric judgments keep missionaries from examining their own beliefs and values to determine which of them are based on biblical foundations and which on their cultural beliefs."
"Everything we see… is just the visible part of reality."
"In reality things reveal nothing to us. It is people who, by looking into at things, discover a way of penetrating the Soul of the World."
"As for our inner level of obstacle, perhaps the only enemy we have is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we need to acknowledge is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know."
"Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either."
"So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey."
