The fact that different species perceive reality very differently is quite evident. But it gets particularly interesting when it comes to human bodily experience. We are the only species able to transform our bodily perceptions into language that can then be used to create primary metaphors that then can be used to create more abstract metaphors. When we stop to think about how much of our daily communications are based upon bodily metaphors, we begin to realize how important bodily experience is to the thinking process. We “grasp” an idea, are out of “touch” with reality, “stretch” our mind, “grab” onto a possibility, “walk” through a problem, “feel” someone’s pain, “smell” a rat, “see” through what someone is telling us, “lose ground,” “stand up” for our principles, “run” up a bill, “stumble” into a relationship, and on and on. It is through the use of metaphors … that we imagine and construct most of our reality. Using metaphors is a way of enriching our bodily experience and giving us a story-line that others can use to identify with us because they too base their experience on a common bodily, spatial, and temporal orientation that is the same for all human beings. -Jeremy Rifkin
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. -Natalie Cliffor Barney
Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is. -Alan Moore
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. – David Deutsch
It’s hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes. -James Altucher
Eventually, all that one has learnt will have to be forgotten. -Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi
What we call reality is the inevitable persistence of a fact of consciousness. -Samuel Harris
Our focus is our reality. What we choose to focus on becomes our world. It produces our thoughts, values, attitudes, and beliefs. -David J. Lieberman
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. -Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. -Walt Whitman
Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions? -Itachi Uchiha
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. -Salman Rushdie
We live on two levels … the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really? -Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
Under each station of the real,
another glimmers.
-Jane Hirshfield
If the true and ultimate reality is unknowable all reality is unknowable; what we take for reality is merely phenomenon, and what we take for knowledge is merely illusion. -Samuel Harris
Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others. -Jorge Luis Borges
We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream. -Anaïs Nin
O the heart has dreams Elysian!
That steal o’er it calm and sweet,
Hushing pain like a magician
Who binds spirits at his feet.
-Walter Richard Cassels
In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole. -Alan Lightman