Being Realistic Quotes

There is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter. ~ Gertrude Stein

Being realistic is the most common path to mediocrity. ~ Will Smith

Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.
Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say "I don't know." It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.
Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don't fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. "How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?" It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting. ~ Hans Rosling

It was around this time that a routine medical screening warned that Chris might have tuberculosis.
We talked about it on the phone. I remember the discussion vividly, not because of the disease--I thought further testing would say he was fine, which it did--but because of his attitude.
Namely, that he was replaceable.
"If I die, you could just get a new husband and Bubba can get a new dad," he told me.
It made me furious. Heartbroken. It was as if he didn't understand how irreplaceable he was to me, to our son, and to the rest of the family.
It was as if he didn't know how much I loved him.
I realized later that, in his mind, he was only being realistic. He wanted what was best for me. He had seen death up close and watched the mission go on, lives go on, whether people wanted it to or not. If he couldn't be there, he still wanted me to be happy.
Even so, it was a devastating statement at the time. In some ways, I never got over it. ~ Taya Kyle

When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle. ~ David R. Brower

Sometimes I feel foolish for hoping she's alive. But then I feel guilty--as if being 'realistic' is giving up.
Other times, I think the uncertainty is the worst part. Alive or dead, I just need to know...
Or maybe that's just a bullshit rationalization. Because I know the day you come here to tell me that she's dead will be the worst day of my life. ~ Jeff Jensen

Cynics build no bridges; they make no discoveries; no gaps are spanned by them. Cynics may pride themselves in being realistic in their approach, but progress and the onward march of civilization demand an inspiration and motivation that cynicism never affords. If we want progress, we must take the forward look. ~ Paul L. McKay

The hunger for believing in good things, usually turns up as starvation. ~ Mladen Đorđević

Our manic accumulation of wealth,' Kuru Qan went on. 'Our headlong progress, as if motion was purpose and purpose inherently virtuous. Our lack of compassion, which we called being realistic. The extremity of our judgements, our self-righteousness - all a flight from death, Brys. All a vast denial smothered in semantics and euphemisms. Bravery and sacrifice, pathos and failure, as if life is a contest to be won or lost. As if death is the arbiter of meaning, the moment of final judgement, and above all else judgement is a thing to be delivered, not delivered unto. ~ Steven Erikson

I'm competitive, but that doesn't stop me from being realistic. ~ Jacques Villeneuve

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic ... Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her. ~ Junot Diaz

How has being "realistic" or "responsible" kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you "should" resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else? ~ Timothy Ferriss

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone.
It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats.
I'm just being realistic. ~ Tracey Emin

Apocalyptic shows us what we're not seeing. It can't be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of "the way things are" whose operation justifies itself by crowning itself as "the way things ought to be" and whose greatest virtue is in being "realistic." Thinking through what we mean by "realistic" is where apocalyptic begins. ~ David Dark

You want to know how many times a day I question why I'm with you?" "Five times." "A hundred." "If you told me you were going to exaggerate, I would have picked that, but I thought we were being realistic here, hun. ~ Krista Ritchie

Believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic. ~ Seth Godin

I wasn't trying to make a following. I was just trying to make interesting music. That's not being modest, that's just being realistic. ~ Girl Talk

I'm always being realistic. ~ Stefan Edberg

I was giving up
being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. ~ Tobias Wolff

Sometimes I have to act crazy to handle the crazies. Trying to be normal near the crazies makes me as crazy as them. The more I push reason and logic on them, the more they pervert it and use it against me, the angrier they make me feel. It's much easier to pretend they're ghosts talking to the wind, and ignore them as if they weren't really human. My mood improves, my self-esteem is better and I feel happier. On another hand, maybe I'm just being realistic here, because you can't really talk to the dead. That's what people without respect or empathy are; dead in the brain; just walking bodies without a soul. ~ Robin Sacredfire

In being realistic we do not always have to be pessimistic. Christ never blinked his eyes at bad things. But he never became so obsessed with human evil that he lost faith in man. ~ Ralph Washington Sockman

What you think is fake in your head comes off as not enough on camera, a lot of times. You almost have to overdo it, in this overly, sort of Broadway, large-gestures kind of way to come off as being realistic on camera. It's strange. You almost have to act really fake to come off looking real. ~ Jack White

One evening, on being quite occupied by the state of the struffoli, I seated the Duca di San Orvieta with the Duchessa opposite, and between two of his mistresses. They fought over his attentions, above the table and below, like squid intent on extracting a mollusc from its shell. The poor man was so distracted that he hardly ate a bite. The Duchessa's words to me afterwards were not lacking in picturesque vividness. ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together. ~ Emanuel Ax

What is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man. ~ Annie Besant

If you do pratikraman of a tiger, then even the tiger will do as you ask it to. There is no difference between a tiger and a human being. The difference is in your vibrations! That is why he gets affected. ~ Dada Bhagwan

True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything. ~ Victor Hugo

Ecologically, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation are undermining the very capacity of the earth to sustain advanced forms of life. The crisis is being heightened by massive increases in air and water pollution; by a mounting accumulation of nondegradable wastes, lead residues, pesticide residues and toxic additives in food; by the expansion of cities into vast urban belts; by increasing stresses due to congestion, noise and mass living; and by the wanton scarring of the earth as a result of mining operations, lumbering, and real estate speculation. As a result, the earth has been despoiled in a few decades on a scale that is unprecedented in the entire history of human habitation of the planet. ~ Murray Bookchin

Be the morning in everyone's eyes and make their day turn into a thing of beauty. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. ~ Bill McKibben

My biggest fear has always been being 40 and hating my job. I love challenges. I'm not afraid to try anything. ~ Carla Hall

The battle of the euro is being fought right now in Spain and Italy. The future of the euro is at stake in the next weeks. ~ Luis De Guindos

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was. ~ Michael Chabon

He felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval. ~ Jack Campbell

I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. ~ Lewis Carroll

At the moment, he can tell he's being watched by a stranger, however, so he picks his feet up and tosses his mane just a little more than usual. I allow him his show. There are worse flaws than vanity in a horse. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

It is easy being a manager when you are one of 25,000 sitting in the stand or if you are an ex-player who is now working for the media who will never manage anything better than an under-10 team, thinking he knows best - and you know what I'm talking about, and I will deal with that, trust me. I'm a nice bloke, but not always. ~ Glenn Roeder

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
"He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
"The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ~ Raymond Chandler

If you want to improve your life and live with all that you deserve, you must run your own race. It doesn't matter what other people say about you. What is important is what you say to yourself, being comfortable in your own skin. Be true to you. That's a key source of happiness. ~ Robin S. Sharma

The most important therapeutic capacity is the ability to be present with an open heart and to be grounded in our inner being,in our essence and authentic self, in the meditative quality within, through which we can meet another person. It is to meet that which is already perfect within a person. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

He struggles to understand why fate has spared him and not so many others. Was it to know happiness? His happiness will never be complete. To know love? He will never be sure of being worthy of love. A part of him is still back there, on the other side, where the dead deny the living the right to leave them behind. His recovery will be a road into exile, a journey in which the touch of the woman he loves will matter less than the image of his grandmother buried under a mountain of ashes. ~ Elie Wiesel

You're going to make mistakes as a parent. It's literally inevitable. You're human, and mistakes are just part of being human. It's how you handle your mistakes that matters most. Acknowledge them. Apologize for them. Make them as right as possible. Learn something from them. And then let them go. It's okay. I promise. After all, how else will our little humans learn that it's okay to be human. ~ L.R. Knost

The whole cosmos is a materialized thought of the Creator. This heavy, earthly clod, floating in space, is a dream of God. He made all things out of His consciousness, even as man in his dream consciousness reproduces and vivifies a creation with its creatures. "'God first created the earth as an idea. Then He quickened it; energy atoms came into being. He coordinated the atoms into this solid sphere. All its molecules are held together by the will of God. When He withdraws His will, the earth again will disintegrate into energy. Energy will dissolve into consciousness; the earth-idea will disappear from objectivity. "'The substance of a dream is held in materialization by the ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

The bright side of it is," said Puddleglum, "that if we break our necks getting down the cliff, then we're safe from being drowned in the river. ~ C.S. Lewis

Up here [in space], you're free. Really free, for the first time in your life. All the laws and rules and prejudices they've been dumping on you all your life ... they're all down there. Up here it's a new start. You can be yourself and do your own thing ... and nobody can tell you different. ~ Ben Bova

Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic. ~ Chuck Close

The essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. ~ Rollo May

Solitude is a wonderful thing in two ways. First, it allows a man to be with himself, and second, it prevents him being with others. ~ Paul Hoffman

Well, my transition into being a captain was easy. ~ Mark Messier

I have never been comfortable being the front man. ~ Tom Petty

The witch-burnings did not take place during the "Dark Ages," as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, "men's" minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular "Enlightenment," in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women's culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women's bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them. ~ Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves; and what I have tried to show throughout this book is that the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. From Percy Bysshe Shelley to Norman N. Holland, literary theory has been indissociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values. Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Nor should this be in the least cause for surprise. For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future. It is not a matter of regretting that this is so - of blaming literary theory for being caught up with such questions, as opposed to some 'pure' literary theory which might be absolved from them. Such 'pure' literary theory is an academic myth: some of the theories we have examined in this book are nowhere more clearly ideological than in their attempts to ignore history and politics altogether. Literary theor ~ Terry Eagleton

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown. ~ Herbert Spencer

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them. ~ Daniel Kahneman

I've taken blame about being a bad father - if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time. ~ Michael Douglas

Modern architects and engineers are still trying to understand how the ancient Greeks were able to build the Parthenon in ten years when the restoration of the monument has continued for more than three decades and is still not complete. What they have learned and shared along this arduous path of rediscovery is that the Greeks were highly skilled at building visual compensations into their structures. Columns were crafted and positioned to compensate for how the eye interprets what it sees at a distance. Subtle variances in the surface of platforms, columns, and colonnades provide the appearance of geometric proportion, whereas if they had worked from the perspective of a flat datum surface, the brain would interpret the results as being slightly skewed. ~ Christopher Dunn

Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common. ~ Satchel Paige

Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week. ~ Herman Wouk

If you ask me, taking on risk and being more daring is a real important part of creativity. ~ Deborah Meier

I missed my home - like the physicality of my home, I missed my friends and my family mostly and just hanging out and being in your home country - culturally it feels right and that is what I miss. ~ Orlando Bloom

Every day, in some way, we're all being prepared for something better. ~ Cheryl Richardson

Give to another human being without the expectation of a return. ~ Bill Bradley

How's your orange juice, Anna? Does it have a touch of lime?"
The glass paused at my lips as I processed his innuendo, and I took a second to make sure my embarrassment stayed hidden inside. I let the drink swish over my tongue a moment before swallowing and answering.
"Actually it's a little sour," I said, and he laughed.
"Thats a shame. " he picked up a green pear from his plate and bit into it, licking juice that dripped down his thumb. My cheeks warmed as I set down my glass.
"Okay, now you're just being crude," I said.
He grinned with lazy satisfaction. ~ Wendy Higgins

I'm sick of being sick, but I would be sicker of being dead. ~ Ben Tolosa

Basilicas should be constructed on a site adjoining the forum and in the warmest possible quarter, so that in winter business men may gather in them without being troubled by the weather. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Sex is a metaphor for everything else and everything is a metaphor for sex as well. Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns, two separate countries, two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis. Or chaos, or harmony. You're not quite sure what's going to happen, but it is the most catastrophic, exciting, and weakening thing that can happen to us. If we are personally involved in it, every fiber of our being is made self-conscious, or is encourages to unify on some level with others. We are delicate. We bring our damage to sexuality, we bring our hopes, we bring our self-image, we bring our world-image, we bring what we believe we are/what we believe we aren't, our blind spots, our prejudices, our sadness. Everything comes out. A lot of people are left wanting, and confusing, and having the idea that their body is like an unloved apartment building; it's up for grabs and it's of absolutely no worth. If we feel that way about ourselves and if we feel that way about others, then of course, sex is nothing more than a lot of rubbing and some kind of release. But the more we are, the more we can feel, the more we can empathize, the more human we are. ~ Melinda Gebbie

It is unfair of me to say so, but the slogan Booth shouted from the stage of Ford's Theatre, the over-blown, self-important, pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death feels like the stamp of approval. ~ Sarah Vowell