Eliot Spitzer Quotes

I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.

Never turn your back on reality. It surrounds you.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

There comes a moment... When imagination gives out and Reality leaps forth. It is frightful!

Recognize reality even when you don't like it-especially when you don't like it.

Reality is painful -- it's so much easier to keep doing stuff you know you're good at or else to pick something so hard there's no point at which it's obvious you're failing -- but it's impossible to get better without confronting it.

Everyone needs reality to punch them in the face every once in a while. Keeps you on guard.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.

There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.

I have something to tell you non-smokers that I know for a fact that you don't know, and I feel it's my duty to pass on information at all times. Ready?. . . . Non-smokers die every day . . . Enjoy your evening. See, I know that you entertain this eternal life fantasy because you've chosen not to smoke, but let me be the 1st to POP that bubble and bring you hurling back to reality . . . You're dead too.

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?

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.

The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.

And make no mistake, my friend, your pointless life will end; but before you go, can you look at the truth?

Truth is not always a pleasant thing.

One and all have to face reality now.

Here's Henry, trying to burst the bubble still further, if indeed it needs more bursting

Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.

To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this the inability to confront that which is.