Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

The past isn't real because it's history, and the future isn't because it hasn't happened yet. I like it, it hints at virtual reality, which I think is how we sort of feel about life sometimes.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Nothing is real.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Reality is what you can get away with.

... reality stands before them, yet they don't see it, because what you call real is just the mirror image of your expectations.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Until we Dream of Life and Life becomes a Dream.

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life!

Reality is a question of perspective.

Fantasy is often closer to reality than what most people accept as reality.

Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.