Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger. Dalai Lama
There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Hope is the denial of reality. Margaret Weis
There is no reality except in action. Jean-Paul Sartre
Reality alone is reliable. Jean-Paul Sartre
Don’t confuse facts with reality. Robert Ballard
Your realities, sir, is lies and balderdash. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 1989 starring Uma Thurman & John Neville & Eric Idle & Jonathan Pryce & Oliver Reed & Sarah Polley & Bill Paterson & Charles McKeown & Winston Dennis & Robin Williams & Alison Steadman & Ray Cooper et al, director Terry Gilliam
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is ‘important’ in the sense of being ‘worthy of being known’. Max Weber
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. John Lennon
Imagination creates reality. Richard Wagner
Fear not what is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed. Bhagavad Gita
We have been taught lies. Reality is not at all what we perceive it to be. We cannot survive any longer by hanging on to the falsehoods of the past. Reality must be discerned at all costs if we are to be a part of the future. Truth must prevail in all instances, no matter who it hurts or helps, if we are to continue to live upon this earth. At this point what we want may no longer matter. It is what we must do to ensure our survival that counts. The old way is in the certain process of destruction and a New World Order is beating down the door. Bill Cooper
There is a reality – so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That’s what I’m trying to get down in photography. Alfred Stieglitz, cited M Orvell, 1989
Descartes was beginning to doubt everything, down to the question of whether he existed at all ... One thing he could be absolutely certain of was the existence of his thinking, doubting mind. He summed it up in a neat philosophical phrase: ‘I think therefore I am’. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion, BBC 2010
It’s time to wake up. The people in power go out of their way to make sure you are perpetually misled and manipulated. The majority’s perception of reality, especially in the political arena, is not their own; it is cruelly imposed upon them without their knowing it. Zeitgeist addendum, 2008
Reality needs an observer to be as we perceive it. David Icke, interview with Alex Jones, Dark Forces Behind the New World Order
Blanche: I don’t want Realism.
Mitch: Naw, I guess not.
Blanche: I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. James Baldwin
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task of life is to find reality. Iris Murdoch, cited The Times 15th April 1983
We see things not as they are but as we are. H M Tomlinson
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight. Joseph Conrad
This is impossible but true: we know how entanglement works but we do not know why it works. All we know is that reality down at the quantum level is not the reality we see around us. (Universe & Quantum Physics & Reality) Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s2e7: How Does the Universe Work? Science 2011
Do we live in the real world or is it all in our minds? Do we see the universe as it is? Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s4e8: Is Reality Real?
When your senses are shut off, your brain makes up its own version of reality. ibid.
Our brains seem to resist negative information. But only when it applies to us. ibid.
What if there is less to reality than what there appears to be? ibid.
There is a chance we are all part of a giant simulation. ibid.
Reality continues to ruin my life. Bill Watterson
Reality is frequently inaccurate. Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. John Keats
Nothing is more real than nothing. Samuel Beckett
Reality has a well-known liberal bias. Stephen Colbert, White House correspondents' association dinner 2006
Seeing is not believing ... Realities which lie beyond human experience. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey IV: A Sky Full of Ghosts, Fox 2014
We live on one level of existence but there are others. These hidden dimensions of reality are everywhere. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odessey VI: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still
Your lives as you knew them are over. For the next forty-eight hours is about abandoning everything you knew or thought you could rely on and adjusting to the new reality. Utopia s1e3, Channel 4 2013
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The most complex thing we’ve discovered in the universe is the human brain. For the past twenty years I’ve been trying to understand how what happens in three pounds of jello-like material somehow becomes us. The Brain with David Eagleman: What is Reality? BBC 2016
What is reality? … We’re all just an illusion constructed in your head. ibid.
Seeing relies less on the light streaming into our eyes and more on what’s already in our head. ibid.
Colour doesn’t actually exist. ibid.
They [Allies] forged a coherent memory of the War. It is the memory of the Good War which we have lived with for fifty years. But in the process the victors buried those fragments that didn’t fit. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead I: On the Desperate Edge of Now, BBC 1995
The Allies selected certain memories: they used them to build the official version of the Good War. ibid.
The Nazis’ project was far more than a simple reawakening of history. Their aim was to use the power of the past to transform those they governed into new and better people. ibid.
We live, said one, on the desperate edge of now. ibid.
The Allies forged a simple, powerful story. But the memories and experiences that didn’t fit the story were quietly discarded and forgotten. ibid.
The Germans called it Zero Hour: the destruction of all belief in the past. ibid.
What frightened Jackson [prosecutor] was the link between the political ideas that Goering was explaining to the court and the terrible crimes the Nazis had committed. ibid.
What was buried at Nuremberg was any idea of examining why Nazism had happened in the first place. What the social and political forces were that had led ordinary people to such savagery. ibid.
The students were convinced that what they had uncovered was a hidden continuity with the Third Reich. Beneath the facade of a liberal democratic country the fascist state had continued run by the very same men and women who had run Hitler’s regime. ibid.
They were known as the Red Army faction. The Red Army faction embarked on a series of bombings and shoot-outs with the police. Their strategy was to use violence to provoke the state into exposing its true identity. But as the violence escalated, some of the terrorist leaders began to have doubts. ibid.