George Orwell Quotes

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define Reality. But what does it mean to be “correct” or “true”? Merely vague concepts… Their Reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

I never believe I'm presenting objective reality; I also don't want to delude people into thinking that my subject is talking directly to them.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.

Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became.

We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Reality is a question of perspective.

I create my own reality. And I'm not the only one. My reality is becoming more prominent.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

The universe is in the experience. It's not just out there. What's out there, we don't know. But for humans it's an experience just like the universe for a dolphin or an insect with 100 eyes is a different experience. Our universe is a human universe experienced in human consciousness and, unless we understand how consciousness operates, we will never actually be able to participate in the creation of our personal and collective reality.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.