“I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities.”
Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 7, p. 159
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J.B. Priestley 35
English writer 1894–1984Related quotes

As quoted in "My interview with R.A. Lafferty", by Tom Jackson, originally published in Lan's Lantern #39 (1991)
Context: I don't regard myself as a Surrealist in the sense of the "Surrealist Manifesto" published by Andre Breton in 1924. To me, that Manifesto is somewhat dated, being a recoil from World War I, and being too heavily Freudian. My own unconscious is more Jungian than Freudian. But if Breton hadn't staked claim to the name, I would probably call myself a Surrealist in the "Remembrance of Things Within" sense, but not in the "world of dream and fantasy joined to the everyday rational world, becoming 'an absolute reality, a surreality'." I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of myself and me. As often as not, it is the subconscious that supplies the rational element, and the exterior world that supplies the dream and fantasy feeling.

BuzzFlash interview (2004)
Context: Stock market bubbles don't grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality — but reality as distorted by a misconception. Under normal conditions misconceptions are self-correcting, and the markets tend toward some kind of equilibrium. Occasionally, a misconception is reinforced by a trend prevailing in reality, and that is when a boom-bust process gets under way. Eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable, and the bubble bursts.

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119
Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 7 “Tiresias Descending, or Trouble on Triton” (p. 322)


“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”
Note to the 1946 edition
Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911)

[Stackpole, http://members.tripod.com/~limsk/pulling.htm, "The Pulling Report", 2007-05-27]