Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

If you ask me, everything... every event that takes place changes your life.

Things are always different from what they might be.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

People are disappointed that you aren't exactly who they thought you were, as opposed to somebody who's just walking around trying to get some laundry done.

When everything seems like its changed…its because things have." Ethan Wate in Beautiful Creatures.

It only takes one profound experience to change somebody's life.

A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming.

Illusion never changed into something real.

A single fantasy can transform a million realities.

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimms, and makes it indistinct As water is in water

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

We are tired who follow after fantasy and truth that flies: You with only look and laughter stain our hearts with richest dyes.

Fiction creating reality.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be.

Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect.