Reality quotes
10.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside reality — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality."
"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger."
"Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far."
"For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on."
"It's great to have an acting job in the age of Reality TV."
"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying."
"When your mind is set in meditative equipoise, you can see reality exactly as it is"
"The most common occupation for women in G rated films is royalty - which is a great gig, if you can get it."
"History illumes reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life"
"Reality is based on perception"
"Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics."
"Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library."
"What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities."
"Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion."
"If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized."
"As TV embedded itself into the national consciousness, it got us to remember how more than just the facts transmits truth and reality - and in fun, engaging ways. TV also showed us how telling our stories, confronting our own truths makes us and the people with whom we're sharing feel less lonely and alienated."
"I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them."
"Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short."
"Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall."
"I would never predict a run like that. Last season, that's beyond reality. I think we can go 25-14. I think we can play 10 games over .500, even more than (that) over .500, and that would be a great run. Any time you go 30-15 or something like that, that's pretty incredible basketball."
