Quotes About Realism

Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" ("someday I'll do this, someday I'll do that") is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro

Throughout his career, he operated in the realm of the possible, taking the world as it was, not as he wished it to be, and he often inveighed against a dogmatic insistence upon perfection.

I can't worry about something I can't change.

realpolitik

Plato appeals to soaring idealism scornful of the practical. Aristotle appeals to joyful realism on earth. Kant appeals to rage.

Although attempting to bridge the gulf which separated the real from the unreal, he refused to treat the latter supernaturally. That mystery which lesser minds found in the occult, he saw in nature all about him. He denied the existence of spirits, just as he urged the foolishness of the will-o'-the-wisps of former ages,—alchemy and the black art.

Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed—and never will

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

The pessimistic coach complains about the play. The optimistic coach expects it to change. The realistic coach adjusts what he can control.

Don't overstate your likely achievements; when in doubt, understate them.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Cynical realism—it's the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause!

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything. Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively in drawing.

Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero-worship, if the circumstances are favourable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavourable, of persecuting a scapegoat

I never expect a perfect work from an imperfect man.

Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.

every wife [..] had a mental list of things that her husband should do but realistically never would do.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it.

One of his favorite themes was the expressionistic barrenness of the old Honeymooners set; later he would become an advocate of realism, saying that humor derived from the one off-center element in a setting of absolute normality.

Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig or as a hash slinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what it smells like out there. If everything you write smells like a library, then your prospective audience will be limited to those who like the smell of libraries.

They say real girls aint never perfect, perfect girls aint real.

He who undertakes too much seldom succeeds.