“We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.”
“This sort of adoration of the real is but a heightening of the beau ideal.”
“Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?”
“To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.”
“Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.”
“There are occasions when it is undoubtedly better to incur loss than to make gain.”
“Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.”
“Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.”
“It takes only one other person to say it's so-one other point of reality to make something real.”
“What is a lie? It is to say what is real is not real. It is to deny the existence of what exists.”
“Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.”
“Fear not what is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.”
“We must learn to tailor our concepts to fit reality, instead of trying to stuff reality into our concepts.”
“Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.”
“The successful people of this world take life as it comes. They just go out and deal with the world as it is.”
“How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.”
“In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.”
“The stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do.”
“A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.”
“In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.”
“You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.”
“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
“One might speak to great length of the three corners of reality what was seen, what was thought to be seen, and what was thought ought to be seen.”
“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”
“The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.”
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
“The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.”
“There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.”
“The realist is the man, who having weighed all the visible factors in a given situation and having found that the odds are against him, decides that fighting is useless.”
“It has sometimes been said that we find nowhere in nature an analogue of the difference between ''happens'' and ''is,'' on the one hand, and ''ought,'' on the other hand.”