Power is the ability to define reality and to have other people respond to your definition as if it were their own.

- Dr. Wade Noble

Reality is the leading cause of stress for those who are in touch with it.

- Lily Tomlin

No great artist ever sees things as they are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

- Oscar Wilde

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

- Maya Angelou

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed to us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

- James Baldwin

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

- Baruch Spinoza

Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.

- Robert Heller

Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.

- Alexis Carrel

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

- Saul Alinsky

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

- Albert Einstein

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

- Arthur Eddington

[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

- Isaac Asimov

When you argue with reality, you lose - but only 100% of the time.

- Byron Katie

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

- Groucho Marx

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

- Gustave Flaubert

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

- Lionel Trilling



To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer



Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

- Salman Rushdie



Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

- Mason Cooley



The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

- Tom Clancy



The reality is more excellent than the report.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

- Wallace Stevens



I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

- Salvador Dali



Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick



Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

- Sigmund Freud



To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

- Louis-Ferdinand Céline



What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?

- Anne Sexton



Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

- Graham Greene



Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

- Henry Miller



(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

- Margaret Fuller



Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

- John Lennon