Bertolt Brecht Quotes

Reality isn't what it used to be.

Any attempt to recreate a world of 1814, or 100 years before that - I think it's important to understand that the people of the time had a different concept of what reality was. Their reality was much more haunted.

A work of visionary art can shock a person out of their normal thinking patterns and help them to see the world in a new way, helping them to transfigure their perception of reality. Obviously, it's only one of many potential catalysts to healing and transformation, but I think it can be a significant one.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Reality has changed chameleonlike before my eyes so many times that I have learned, or am learning, to trust almost anything except what appears to be so.

...photographs are facts, but not necessarily true... The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

As "Calvin and Hobbes" went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what's going on in Calvin's head.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Reality whistles a different tune underwater.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

...reality is always plural and mutable.

You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.