Quotes about Reality

Mere words.. Was there anything so real as words?

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.

Was there anything so real as words?

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.

Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion - a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Jack.  That wouldn't be at all a bad thing. Algernon.  Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow.  Don't try it.  You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University.  They do it so well in the daily papers. 

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real condition of the object.