Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.
REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.
How can we hope, after all, to see a tree or rock or clear north sky if we do not adopt a little of their mode of life, a little of their time? if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space “in no time” is to have denied its reality
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. It makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory.
The world ultimately is what we say it is.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
I want to challenge the presumption that the world cannot know it is the world unless there is an alternative to the world.
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
As long as we accept alien definitions of reality and internalize them, we remain powerless. If we can emerge with such new definitions and not be so thoroughly intimidated by the existing paradigm, we can begin to collect on our destiny.
We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.
Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.
The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.
The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.
