Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define Reality. But what does it mean to be “correct” or “true”? Merely vague concepts… Their Reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

The world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That's reality. The reality that's being talked about is something else entirely.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Reality is a question of perspective.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

We live in condensations of our imagination