John Perry Barlow Quotes

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.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Reality: What a concept!

A feeling is not a fact.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

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.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

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

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

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

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.

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

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.

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

The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

What you see is what you see.

Truth is always a delusion.

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.