Lily Tomlin Quotes

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

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

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

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.

The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

One place exists as their interpretation of it. For the people living and thriving inside of it, it's another place.

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?

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Reality is mind-made.

You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.