„We act like a zero-sum society, when in reality there is a lot of non zero-sum fat to be skimmed off to everyone's mutual advantage.“

„Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.“

—  Eliezer Yudkowsky American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher 1979

Your Strength As A Rationalist http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ (August 2007)

„Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.“

—  Alan Bennett English actor, author 1934

"The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 384 (1981).
Writing Home (1994)

„The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.“

—  Richard Bach American spiritual writer 1936

Quelle: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

„Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone... The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs... After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world... The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one's feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero.“

—  Gerhard Richter German visual artist, born 1932 1932

Quelle: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 41, note 30

„Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.“

—  Wallace Stevens American poet 1879 - 1955

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

„We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.“

—  Stanisław Lem, buch Solaris

Quelle: Solaris (1961), Ch. 6: "The Little Apocrypha", p. 72
Kontext: We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are seaching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.

„Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.“

—  Charles de Gaulle eighteenth President of the French Republic 1890 - 1970

La politique, quand elle est un art et un service, non point une exploitation, c'est une action pour un idéal à travers des réalités.
Press conference, June 30 1955
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2
Quelle: "Le Général de Gaulle et la construction de l'Europe" https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wg4ZAQAAIAAJ (1967), pg 33. note: 1950s

„Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.“

—  André Breton French writer 1896 - 1966

„By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.“

—  Eric Wolf American anthropologist 1923 - 1999

Quelle: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 6.

„Bell's theorem says that reality must be non-local.“

—  Nick Herbert American physicist 1936

Quelle: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 12, Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem, p. 212
Kontext: Bell himself managed to devise such a proof which rejects all models of reality possessing the property of "locality". This proof has since become known as Bells theorem. It asserts that no local model of reality can underlie the quantum facts. Bell's theorem says that reality must be non-local.

„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.“

—  Jeffrey Eugenides, buch Middlesex

Quelle: Middlesex

„Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.“

—  John Lennon English singer and songwriter 1940 - 1980

As quoted in Sunday Herald Sun [Melbourne, Australia] (13 January 2003)]
Variante: Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

„I'll tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.“

—  Paulo Coelho Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947

Veronika Decides to Die (1998)

„Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people's expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would.“

—  Baltasar Gracián, buch The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Maxim 19 (p. 12)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)
Kontext: Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people's expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would. This rule does not hold true for bad things: when an evil has been exaggerated, its reality makes people applaud. What was feared as ruinous comes to seem tolerable.

„From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.“

—  Robert Charles Wilson, buch Vortex

Quelle: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

„The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. … While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society.“

—  Anthony Giddens British sociologist 1938

(describing Marx’s view), pp. 41-42.
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971)

„Non-physical reality is called Parusa in Sanskrit or Universal Soul is an abiding reality. It is logical, but remains conceptual to our minds under we experience it’s realization within ourselves.“

—  B.K.S. Iyengar Indian yoga teacher and scholar 1918 - 2014

Quelle: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 9

„I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.“

—  Diane Setterfield, buch The Thirteenth Tale

Quelle: The Thirteenth Tale

„Life is not theory. It is reality, with inherent duties to everything and everyone.“

—  Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka painter from Hungary 1853 - 1919

The Authority