Albert Einstein:

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

Anne Sexton:

What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?

Arthur Eddington:

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Byron Katie:

When you argue with reality, you lose - but only 100% of the time.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

Graham Greene:

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Groucho Marx:

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

Gustave Flaubert:

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Henry Miller:

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

John Lennon:

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Lionel Trilling:

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline:

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

Margaret Fuller:

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Mason Cooley:

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Philip K. Dick:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The reality is more excellent than the report.

Salman Rushdie:

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

Salvador Dali:

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

Saul Alinsky:

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

Sigmund Freud:

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Tom Clancy:

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Wallace Stevens:

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.