Quotes About Realism

I'm about as scientific as a saltine

I don't come from Lake Wobegon, and that world is not mine. It's not that funny to me. It's funny to other people, and I'm not judging it, but the world that I come from is not considered funny by other people as well. There's so much pain in it.

I do not think direct experience is always necessary to act, but I believe that sometimes you have to have had the real experience to act certain roles. One of those was losing your family member. I was not being able to imagine how sad that could be.

Top Boy' didn't try to glamorise anything. It gave it to you how it was. But it also dealt with mental health, social situations, immigration.

Even for the most difficult scenes, and there are difficult scenes in the film, and because Michael Haneke is such a great film-maker - I think a great film-maker is not only being inspired, but how to do it, how to make it as real as possible, knowing that it's not real.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

In the Middle East, we don't have the luxury to indulge in fantasy.

I knew from day one what I was going into with the Milan job.

Perhaps in the end the first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political ideals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest: that because of this we prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practicability in the political ideals of our enemies—which may, of course, be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own.

Growing up in a very dysfunctional family, I learned early in my life not to have high expectations. As a consequence, my ideas didn't often pan out. I guess I figured that if I didn't expect much, I wouldn't be disappointed. But instead, I ended up being disappointed most of the time.

Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society.

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

Look, the key for me is to keep expectations low.

O pátio [da prisão] era cercado de entradas e saídas. Não dava a impressão de hermetismo, como se deveria esperar. É inevitável que se tenha uma ideia romântica de uma prisão, embora, como era o meu caso, não soubesse o que era o romantismo. Nem uma prisão, para ser sincera. Esta passava uma sensação de realismo exacerbada e destruidora; as ideias prévias, embora não as tivesse, ruíam.

As a contemplative man I am an arrant realist, so that I am capable of desiring nothing from all the things that present themselves to me, and of wishing nothing added to them. I make no sort of distinction among objects beyond whether they interest me or not.42

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world,

Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren't dreaming of taking over the world.

If you're a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you're much more likely to hear "go change the water cooler" than you are "go change the world.

Economy is idealism in its most practical form.

The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.

Practicality is a great help when it comes to getting things achieved,

He has no goals in life. Unless you count being a professional soccer player, which is totally unrealistic.

You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector; but you mustn't be romantic about money

This was yet another one of those things that school failed to prepare you for: how to deal with the unpredictable behavior of real people in the real world.