Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.

The universe is real, but you can't see it. You have to imagine it.

Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

If you have it and you know you have it, then you have it. If you have it and don't know you have it, you don't have it. If you don't have it but you think you have it, then you have it.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

That which is cannot be true.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.