Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt
The mind which is alert, watchful, which is free of fear, is an innocent mind; and it is only the innocent mind that can understand reality, truth or God.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
—John Steinbeck
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
—Philip K. Dick
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
—Albert Schweitzer
In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.
—George Bernard Shaw
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
—Albert Einstein
In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.
—Nicholas Chamfort
Facts are the enemy of truth.
—Miguel de Cervantes
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
—Eric Hoffer
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
—Iris Murdoch
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
—Daniel Webster
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
—John Updike in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
—Philip K. Dick