Thomas Nagel Quotes

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

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.

What reality was ever made by realists?

We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

[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.

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.

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.

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

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

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.