Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Okri

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

Barbara Jordan

We can certainly defuse the intensity of the anti-immigrant feeling if we can bring some reality to the discussion by showing that they are not using that many resources.

Barbara Kingsolver

For scientists, reality is not optional.

Barbara Kingsolver

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Bai Ling

When you're challenged, you're totally alive and totally dealing with reality, particularly if it could be dangerous. And that excites me!

Bashar al-Assad

Politics is about realities, not logic.

Bashar al-Assad

They want to criticize you, let them criticize and do not worry. Just be transparent with your people and tell them this is the reality.

Baruch Spinoza

But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.

Baruch Spinoza

Reality and perfection are synonymous.

Baruch Spinoza

It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

Arthur Koestler

Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.

Arthur Koestler

The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality.

Arthur Koestler

If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality...

Arthur Koestler

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Art Spiegelman

In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.

Art Buchwald

I don't know whether this is the best of times or the worst of times, but I assure you it's the only time you've got. You can either sit on your expletive deleted or pick a daisy.

Ayrton Senna

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

Azar Nafisi

The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

Azar Nafisi

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

Azar Nafisi

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

Ayn Rand

Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Ayn Rand

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Charles Fillmore

The Inexhaustible Resource of Spirit is equal to every demand. There is no reality in lack. Abundance is here and now manifest.

Charles Fillmore

Deny that lack has any place or reality in your thought or your affairs and affirm plenty as the only appearance. Praise what you have, be it ever so little, and insist that it is constantly growing larger.

Charles Bukowski

I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.

Charles Bukowski

i never understood society. i undersand that it works somehow and that it functions as a reality and that its realities are necessary to keep us from worse realities. but all i sense are that are plenty of police and jails and judges and laws and that what is meant to protect me is breaking me down...

Charles Bukowski

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Charles Bukowski

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

Charles Bukowski

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Charles Bukowski

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

The reality is, what are you going to do next?

The reality is there is a problem, even if it were only perception.

The reality is there are only 52 Saturdays in a year . . . It makes sense to look at the alternatives.