Reality

But this is not my little bed;
That time is far away;
With strangers now I live instead,
From dreary day to day.
~ William Allingham, from Flower Pieces and Other Poems (1888). Half-waking

Waiting to be real
We mean to explore kindness and its enormous silences.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), in Calligrammes (1918). La jolie rousse (The Pretty Redhead)

[I]t is better to encounter one's existence in disgust than never to encounter it at all.
~ William E. Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958).

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.
~ William S. Burroughs

We are what we myth.
~ William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (1986).

One thing alone lay in [Zora's] wild fancy like a great and wonderful fact dragging the dream to earth and anchoring it there. That was the Silver Fleece.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Twenty: The Weaving Of The Silver Fleece

A man who is not sure of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of existence; at any moment, the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth.
~ William James "Will" Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey Of Human Life And Destiny (1929). Part I. Chapter I. The Lure of Philosophy

All possible definitions of probability fall short of the actual practice.
~ William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications (1968).

Reality is an illusion that occurs due to the lack of alcohol.
~ W.C. Fields

We pretend to have each of us a judgment of our own: but in truth we wait with the most patient docility, till he whom we regard as the leader of the chorus gives us the signal, Here you are to applaud, and Here you are to condemn.
~ William Godwin, Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions and Discoveries (1831). Essay X. Of Imitation and Invention

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days. ... The kind of fractured, short term information overload that we're all exposed to every day.
~ William Henry Jackson (Bill) Griffith, in Goblin Magazine (Interview).

I've thought about your mother a lot, and she has never been an abstraction to me. Everyone here knows I have felt horrible about this. It is absolutely unacceptable that it happened.
~ William Harris (courtroom address to the victim's son), The San Francisco Chronicle (15 February 2003). SLA members sent to prison: Ex-radicals sentenced for murder

What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821). Preface

Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.
~ William Dean Howells, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1889). Editor's Study

It is quite natural and inevitable that if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world, and about five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem about two hundred times more real to us than God or our souls.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Religion and Life: The Foundations of Personal Religion (1923).

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Outspoken Essays, First Series (1919). Patriotism

One test is infallible. Whatever view of reality deepens our sense of the tremendous issues of life in the world wherein we move, is for us nearer the truth than any view which diminishes that sense.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Christian Mysticism, The Bampton Lectures (1899). Lecture I. General Characteristics of Mysticism

The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Outspoken Essays, First Series (1919). Survival and Immortality

There are few among our ecclesiastics and theologians who would spend five minutes in investigating alleged supernatual occurences in our own time. It would be assumed that if true it must be ascribed to some obscure natural cause.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, from Outspoken Essays, First Series (1919). Bishop Gore And The Church Of England

[B]y far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
~ William James, from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Lecture II. What Pragmatism Means

"Facts" are what are wanted.
~ William James, in The Letters of William Jame (1920) Vol 1. IX. To Carl Stumpf. Letter to Thomas Davison, dated 1 February 1885

If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real?
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call "something there," more deep and more general than any of the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture III: The Reality of the Unseen

No more fiendish torture could be devised than when you speak, no one answers; when you wave, no one turns; but everybody simply cuts you dead. Soon there wells up within you such hostility you attack those who ignore you, and, if that fails to bring you recognition, you turn your hostility on yourself in an effort to prove you really do exist.
~ William James

[S]o long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture XX: Conclusions

Some years ago I myself made some observations on ... nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question -- for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism

The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places, -- they are strung upon it like so many beads.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture XX: Conclusions

The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture II: Circumscription of the Topic

What really exists is not things made but things in the making.
~ William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909). VI. Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
~ William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909). VI. Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism

Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is.
~ William Leith, in The Independent on Sunday (13 September 1992).

From nonexistence I entered existence and what did I find? Bad weather.
~ William Markiewicz, Extracts of Existence (1990).

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts.
~ Peter McWilliams

To see things as they truly and in themselves are, would not always, perhaps be of advantage to us in the intellectual world, any more than in the natural.
~ William Melmoth (the younger), The Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne, On Several Subjects (1742). Letter XVIII. To Hortensius

And for the sceptic to bewail the fact that we can know nothing but appearances is as silly as it would be to bewail the fact that we have nothing to wear but clothes, and nothing to eat but food.
~ William Pepperell (W.P.) Montague, The Ways of Knowing, Or the Methods of Philosophy (1925).

Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.
~ William Pepperell (W.P.) Montague, in The Journal of Philosophy (1910). Program and First Platform of Six Realists

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
~ Bill Moyers, quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). An Interview With Bill Moyers: Facing History and Ourselves

The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime -- it even presupposes it.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space--how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Show, is not Substance: Realities Govern Wise Men.
~ William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude (1693). Part I. Respect

In the same way as everyone and everything in hospitals should invite health, so everyone and everything in every setting should democratically and ethically invite the realization of human potential.
~ William Watson Purkey, in the Journal of Invitational Theory and Practice (1992). An Introduction To Invitational Theory

Look up to the stars. Pay attention to the streets.
~ Wilhelm Raabe

Love, work and knowledge are not ideas, not political programs, not sentiments or creeds. They are tangible realities without which human society could not exist for a single day.
~ Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946 edition & translation; originally written in 1933). Chapter X. Work Democracy

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
~ Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946 edition & translation; originally written in 1933). Chapter X. Work Democracy

What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.
~ Wilma Rudolph, quoted in I Dream a World (1989).

Since the White Male System/Addictive System defines itself as reality, everything else is unreal by definition. Since its referent is the external referent, the internal referent is unreal and nonexistent by definition. The process of invalidating that which the system does not know, understand, cannot measure, and cannot thereby control is so extreme that large areas of perception and knowledge are lost. We give the system the power to make the known unknown.
~ Anne Wilson Schaef

It must be so; for miracles are ceas'd.
~ William Shakespeare, King Henry V

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but, waking, no such matter.
~ William Shakespeare, Sonnet 87

Television remains a surrogate instrument, it is not the real thing but rather an impression of reality. Seeing it on television is not living it.
~ William J. Small, To Kill A Messenger: Television News And The Real World (1970).

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
~ William Stafford, from West of Your City (1960). A Ritual to Read to Each Other

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.
~ William Stafford, from Allegiances (1970).

So, the world happens twice --
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.
~ William Stafford, from Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (1977). Bi-Focal

The wind keeps telling us something
we want to pass on to the world:
Even far things are real.
~ William Stafford, in Learning to Live in the World: Earth Poems by William Stafford (1994). Whispered into the Ground

Treat the world as if it really existed.
~ William Stafford, from Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (1977). Spectator

In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings.
~ Wilhelm Stekel, The Depths of the Soul (1921).

Possession kills desire; realization slays fantasy and transforms the wonderful into the commonplace.
~ Wilhelm Stekhel, The Depths of the Soul (1921).

Life is such, ah, well-a-day! It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena, a Romance upon Romance (1850).

[T]here are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa, many real diamonds which go unvalued.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, in Punch (May 1851). What I Remarked at the Exhibition

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
~ William Isaac "W.I." Thomas (known as the "Definition of the Situation" or the "WI Thomas' dictum"), The Unadjusted Girl with cases and standpoint for behavior analysis (1923).

The unbelieving mind would not be convinced by any proof, and the worshiping heart needs none.
~ Aiden Wilson (A.W.) Tozer

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
~ Vincent Willem van Gogh, in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, vol. 3 (1958). Letter of October 1888

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. ... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
~ Vincent Willem van Gogh, in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, vol. 1 (1958). Letter of 21 July 1892

To be aware of myself, to know that I have an existence as an individual separate and distinct from others is the reality called consciousness.
~ William Thomas Walsh, Scientific Spiritual Healing (1926).

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
~ William Arthur Ward

Science blinds us to the True Reality.
There are dragons hiding in the streets.
We feel their breath but we refuse to see.
Science blinds us to the True Reality.
~ William John Watkins, How the Blind Become the Dead

To reach the real and true I'll make no haste,
More than content with worlds that only seem.
~ William Watson, from Epigrams of Art, Life and Nature (1884). XXVII

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.
~ Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (28 September 1992).

Reality continues to ruin my life.
~ Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (19 February 1993).

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.
~ Bill Watterson, Speech at Kenyon College Commencement, Gambier, Ohio (20 May 1990). Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled

I just thought here is comedy, here is tragedy. That is the way life is. I just tried to do it true to life.
~ Billy Wilder, (1996).

The play is so close to the reality. ... It comes out of the heart.
~ Barbara Williams (on "The Laramie Project"), The Associated Press (9 November 2002). Play on Gay Victim Opens in Calif.

Fairies, assuming for the sake of argument that they exist, are not within the protection of the law of murder.
~ Granville Williams, Law Quarterly Review (1949)

[O]nce you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.
~ Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922).

The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn't know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles.
~ Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922).

You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
~ Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922).

Reality: What a concept!
~ Robin Williams

There's a collective knowing that a dimension of reality exists beyond the material plane, and that sense of knowing is causing a mystical resurgence on the planet today. It's not just children who are looking for a missing piece. It is a very mature outlook to question the nature of our reality.
~ Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace: Having Hope, Finding Forgiveness, and Making Miracles (2002). Introduction: Reclaiming Our Magic

Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the "triviality of everydayness," if he is to do anything worthwhile.
~ Colin Henry Wilson, The Occult (1971).

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson, The Future of Life (2002).

[T]o desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic.
~ Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). Introduction

Do not adjust your mind, it is reality that is malfunctioning.
~ Robert Anton Wilson, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1993 screen play).

Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Vacillation

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
~ William Butler Yeats, from Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918). Ego Dominus Tuus