Famous Quotes & Sayings

William S. Burroughs

The Orgasmic Death Gimmick is rather complicated. It could be called the whole birth-death cycle of action, persuading people that birth and death are realities.

William S. Burroughs

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

William J. Brennan

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.

Virginia Woolf

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...

Viola Spolin

General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene.

Wong Kar-wai

People are very surprised when they come to Hong Kong after seeing my films, because my version of it is quite different than Hong Kong in reality.

Woodrow Wilson

Reality is what I see, not what you see.

Woody Allen

Cynicism is reality with an alternate spelling.

Woody Allen

I have a hyper-active imagination, my mind tends to jump around a little, and I have some trouble between fantasy and reality.

Woody Allen

You always think another time would have been ideal for you . . . the reality is there was no novocaine when you went to the dentist.

Woody Allen

I prefer the magic to reality, and have since I was 5 years old. Hopefully, I can continue to make films and constantly escape into them.

Woody Allen

Reality may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's still the only place where you can get a decent steak.

Woody Allen

I never think I feel cynical in general. Cynical is reality with an alternate spelling. I feel there's a gigantic amount of injustice and overt crime every day in the world, from emotional crimes to international crimes, and it often carries rewards.

Woody Allen

Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble.

Woody Allen

The artist can't give you an answer that's satisfying to the dreadful reality of your existence. So the best you can do is maybe entertain people and refresh them for an hour-and-a-half.

William Whewell

The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements.

William Shirley

Words alone cannot fully convey the realities of the soul or the greatness of the human spirit.

William Morris Hunt

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

William J. Clinton

It's only in America where there seems to be this sort of systematic denial of the reality of global warming at the governmental level, and in too many sectors of the high, the private sector. But it looks to me the business community may actually lead us toward a clean energy future almost in spite of government policy.

William J. Clinton

Rigorously investigated and fearlessly reported, A Crime So Monstrous is a passionate and thorough examination of the appalling reality of human bondage in today's world. In his devastating narrative, Ben Skinner boldly casts light on the unthinkable, yet thriving, modern-day practice of slavery, exposing a global trade in human lives. The abuses detailed in these pages are repugnant, but there is hope to be found: by giving voice to the victims, Skinner helps restore their dignity and makes crucial strides toward closing this shameful chapter in history.

William James

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

William James

When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.

William James

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

William James

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

William James

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

William James

Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.

William James

There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing

William James

Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, "Go forward!" "Come up higher!

William James

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

William Gibson

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.

Whitley Strieber

In a reality made of energy, thoughts may literally be things. What if it was intended that we create our own realities after death?

Sara Gilbert

I am ashamed to admit I watch a lot of reality shows like The Osbournes and The Bachelor.

Samuel P. Huntington

People everywhere talk about Islam and the West. Presumably that has some relationship to reality, that these are entities that have some meaning and they do. Of course the core ofthat reality is differences in religion.