Real Facts Quotes & Sayings

We must all beware the very real and understandable human tendency to ignore or subvert facts, and findings of science, that discomfort us for reasons of ideology, politics, religion, or personal taste. — William R. Brody

Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs. — Martin Gardner

Your God is the best God. In fact, he's the only God. All other Gods are ridiculous, made up rubbish. Not yours though. Yours is real. — Ricky Gervais

The real trouble with Wikipedia lies exactly where its strength lies: its democratic impulse. In an arena where everyone's version of the facts is equally valid, and the opinions of specialists become marginalized, corporate and politicized interests are potentially empowered. — Michael Harris

My title "The Fabrication of Facts," has the virtue not only of indicating pretty clearly what I am going to discuss but also of irritating those fundamentalists who know very well that facts are found not madder, that facts constitute the one and only real world, and that knowledge consists of believing the facts. These articles of faith so firmly possess most of us, they so bind and blind us, that "fabrication of fact" has a paradoxical sound. "Fabrication" has become a synonym for "falsehood" or "fiction" as contrasted with "truth" or "fact." Of course, we must distinguish falsehood and fiction from truth and fact; but we cannot, I am sure, do it on ground that fiction is fabricated and fact found. - 91 — Nelson Goodman

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction. — Nigel Hamilton

Lies can run but they can't hide — Pavankumar Nagaraj

Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real. — George Bernard Shaw

Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history. — Alice Miller

Sometimes I feel that in religious content, religious drama, it's almost told like a tale, like an account of facts, and in 'A.D. The Bible Continues,' it's drama, it's real drama that we like to see on TV today, seeing the characters struggle and doubt and be completely in conflict with each other, kind of like 'House of Cards.' — Juan Pablo Di Pace

... the matter was new to me, and I had no material for its treatment. But I got books, read up the facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure. With me it was a difficult and anxious time till my facts were found, selected, and properly pointed; nor could I rest from research and effort till I was satisfied of correct anatomy; the strength of my inward repugnance to the idea of flaw or falsity sometimes enabled me to shun egregious blunders; but the knowledge was not there in my head, ready and mellow; it had not been down in Spring, grown in Summer, harvested in Autumn, and garnered through Winter; whatever I wanted I must go out and gather fresh; glean of wild herbs my lap full, and shred them green into the pot. — Charlotte Bronte

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. — Henry David Thoreau

Adversity, illness, and death are real and inevitable. We chose whether to add to these unavoidable facts of life with the suffering that we create in our own minds and hearts... the chosen suffering. The more we make a different choice, to heal our own suffering, the more we can turn to others and help to address their suffering with the laughter-filled, tear-stained eyes of the heart. And the more we turn away from our self-regard to wipe the tears from the eyes of another, the more- incredibly- we are able to hear, to heal, and to transcend our own suffering. This is the true secret to joy. — Dalai Lama XIV

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. — Yann Martel

We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste. — C.S. Lewis

I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called education people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction. — Coretta Scott King

The hero is a device which the historian has taken over from the layman. He uses it because he has no scientific vocabulary or technique for dealing with the real facts of history
the opinions, emotions, attitudes; the wishes, plans, schemes; the habits of men. He can't talk about them so he talks about heroes. — B.F. Skinner

Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Our own private intuition is the catalyst for self-improvement and self-realization, because when it comes to making deep and lasting changes in one's personal life, it is only subjective experience, not facts, that registers as real. — Penney Peirce

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. — Edward O. Sisson

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. — Eric Hoffer

Eager watch was
kept for the first appearance of the legendary creature in the village, and it may be said that as far as
appearances went Basil Blake was all that could be asked for. Little by little, however, the real facts
leaked out. Basil Blake was not a film star, not even a film actor. He was a very junior person, rejoicing
in the position of about fifteenth in the list of those responsible for set decorations at Lenville Studios,
headquarters of British New Era Films. The village maidens lost interest and the ruling class of censorious
spinsters took exception to Basil Blake's way of life. — Agatha Christie

When you can feel that you already have what you want, then you will attract what you want. In fact, you already have it. Just feel it now and feel it real. — Joe Vitale

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real? — Robertson Davies

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the "I" out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate "I" or mind can be found. — Alan W. Watts

events are due to decisions, and choices are based on our intentions. What we get is the result of these choices, even though they are unconscious, rather than what we think we want. When we surrender the pressure of wantingness, we are clear to make wiser choices and decisions. We think that our happiness depends on controlling events, and that facts are what upset us. Actually, it is our feelings and thoughts about these facts that are the real cause of our upset. Facts in and of themselves are neutral things. The power we give them is due to our attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance and our overall feeling state. — David R. Hawkins

And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young. — Oscar Wilde

Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes." That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe. — Steven Pinker

not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. — Terry Pratchett

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first ... A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts ... Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. — Gustave Le Bon

When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change. — Margaret Heffernan

I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. — George C. Marshall

The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies - open and undisguised - seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement. — Leon Trotsky

This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them. — Jimmy Carter

The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith. — Rupert Sheldrake

There's a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It's a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. — Marlon James

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another. — Ben Lerner

It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts. — J.B. Priestley

remember, just because you're writing fiction doesn't mean that you can ignore facts. It is those details that make fiction compelling and, in many cases, very real for the reader. — Roy A. Teel Jr.

We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry? ... We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem? ... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.' ... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference ... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind ... boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice. — Rebecca Manley Pippert

The genius of Shakespeare lay in his power to so use the real and individual facts of life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and nobler conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative genius; this is the idealist dealing faithfully with realistic material; this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as distinguished from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the painter, or the writer, that does not reveal to the mind - that comes into relation with it something before out of his experience and beyond the facts either brought before him or with which he is acquainted. — William Shakespeare

Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility. — E. J. Dionne

Another argument: The rich are job creators. They are helping the poor. If their taxes are cut, they can create more jobs. Ah, facts again. The rich actually tend to keep their money by buying prime real estate, yachts, art, and the like - things that will appreciate in value without giving back much to the economy as a whole. Moreover, the rich don't just give jobs out of the goodness of their hearts. Look at economics from the perspective of work: Working people are profit-creators. The rich only create jobs when they can get employees who can create profit for them. The poor create profit for the rich. Conservatives — George Lakoff

He told her, I don't remember any other lover but you.
I don't believe you.
I don't. I know the facts of other lovers, but all the real, visceral memory, or any emotion has burned away. Those lovers happened to someone else, the man I was before I met you. — Thea Harrison

What is to be done with millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We could tell Americans everything is okay and nothing is going to happen. The fact is, there is a very real threat. — Lee Zeldin

If you're searching for the truth, throw out all your prejudices and just gather the facts. If you do that, you'll be able to see the real truth. — CLAMP

For the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common life for us - whether it be by giving the most spiritual interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all. — Oscar Wilde

Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real. — Mason Cooley

In essence, then, the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, single-handedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a 'just price'. The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory — Anonymous

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones. — Paul Valery

History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit. — Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them. — Auguste Comte

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we've been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars - deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields - who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. — Sam Harris

Faith is a reality and it reaches out to facts that are more solid, more real, more substantial, and more eternal than anything registered by our physical senses. — John Phillips

An insane person believes his world is consistent. If he
believes the government is trying to kill him, he will see
ample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. He
will be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse than
your evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you will
be converting evidence of the present into impressions
stored in your minds and you will both be certain your evidence
is solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the facts
and shape the clues until it all fits. — Scott Adams

Facts are no more slid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. Bot both are sensitive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Democrats in Washington predicted that tax cuts would not create jobs, would not increase wages, and would cause the federal deficit to explode. Well, the facts are in. The tax cuts have led to a strong economy. Real wages were on the rise, and deficit has been cut in half three years ahead of schedule. — George W. Bush

Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again. Most have no common sense, and most never acknowledge that they were wrong. — Lawrence Kudlow

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. — Henry David Thoreau

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand. — Michelle Huneven

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish. — Charlotte Bronte

In fact, when it comes to TV, I'm not even sure what my real, true preferences are. — Hank Stuever

I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. — Ray Dalio

Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence - and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's in the book. It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world. — James Randi

Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there's no such thing. You want facts, don't you? Rules. Proof. You're like your father that way. Just because a thing can't be logged, charted, and summarized doesn't mean it isn't real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don't turn out that way. You have to pay attentin to what's real, what's in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it's a choice we could make. — David Wroblewski

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

My music is genuine, and I'm talking about stuff that no one else - no one my age, anyway, in the game - is talking about. Nobody. I'm the only one really stating facts and speaking with real street knowledge. — Shy Glizzy

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world. — Noam Chomsky

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum. — Aaron Swartz

Persons living in this modern world who do not know the basic facts that determine their very existence, functioning, and surroundings, are living in a dream world. Such persons are, in a very real sense, not sane. — Gerald Holton

Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Setting is the bedrock of your story. If you choose a real-world backdrop, be certain you get your facts straight. — Lynn Flewelling

Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the "true Negro," which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of "Negroids," Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity. — Cheikh Anta Diop

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer. — Abraham Lincoln

When you talk to a Republican, many of them just outright say, 'Yeah. Climate change isn't real,' without assessing the facts, and it's a big problem. It's not a red or blue issue, it's a green issue ... Not because of facts or science but because of emotion. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

A vast skylight is cut into the ceiling, so she can fall asleep studying the stars. She doesn't know their real names, preferring mysteries to facts, — Menna Van Praag

Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating.
We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity. — Ernst Cassirer

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Perception is real, truth is not. I'm not fighting for money and possessions. I'm fighting for something more precious. I pray that as we enter the cyber age
the Age of Transparency
the facts and the truth will out. — Imelda Marcos

Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use this information productively. — Susan Winebrenner

You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real. — Chuck Palahniuk

But some characters in books are really real
Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage. — Dodie Smith

I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching. — Thomas Huxley

Memorizing facts and then regurgitating them into carefully crafted words is not science people. It's intellectual bulimia. Real science happens when we explore what we don't know. The first law of understanding the human brain and the mind within, is to be an explorer. — Abhijit Naskar

Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality. — Francois Jacob

People say:
'Let the facts speak for themselves'; they forget that the speech of facts is real only if it is heard and understood. — Ernst F. Schumacher

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one's mind even at today's rudimentary levels of connectivity. The "transactive memory system" called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn't come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind. — Peter Watts

The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas. — William Bernbach

Keeping it real" isn't just a matter of facing up to harsh facts. It also includes opening up to the plethora of possibilities that offer us ways of impacting the world in spite of adversity. — T.K. Coleman

Everyone lives in two worlds," Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. "There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought - in an inscape - every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. — Joe Hill

I'm interested in the fact that within science, you're dealing with properties of the real and physical world, and by using those properties you're really getting more in touch with the basis of reality and using that expressively. — Marc Quinn

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales ... Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. — Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, my love," Erienne breathed as he pressed his lips to her brow, "I was afraid you would come, and yet I hoped you would."
Light kisses rained upon her cheek and brow as he held her close, savoring the nearness of her while he could. "I would have come sooner had I known where they had taken you. I had not expected this of your father, but he will answer. I promise you that."
Erienne shook her head and replied in the same muted tone. "He is not my real father."
Christopher held her away, looking down at her wonderingly. "What is this?"
"My mother married an Irish rebel and got with child before he was hanged. Avery married her, knowing the facts, but he never told her that it was he who had given the final orders to hang my father."
Christopher gently brushed a tumbled curl from off her cheek. "I knew you were too beautiful to be kin to him."

-Erienne & Christopher — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The urge to find the real facts is destructive only to people or systems (friendships, family dynamics, political dynasties) that are based on lies. The truth can scare you half to death, but it's never as destructive as deception. — Martha N. Beck

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be very
useful in the real world, that's for sure. — Haruki Murakami

The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams. — Roger Scruton

Of course UFOs are real-and they are interplanetary ... The cumulative evidence for the existence of UFOs is quite overwhelming and I accept the fact of their existence. — Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding