C. S. Lewis Quotes

Things are only real after one has learned to agree on their realness. What took place this evening, for instance, cannot possibly be real to you, because no one could agree with you about it. 'Do you mean that you didn't see what happened?'. Of course I did. But I don't count. I am the one who's lying to you, remember?

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.

Truth is always a delusion.

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

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made up truths.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.

I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

Reality is what resists.

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.