Realism Quotes

I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor. ~ Arjun Rampal

Wine is bottled poetry, he thinks [...] He wonders if the poem of the circus could possibly be bottled. ~ Erin Morgenstern

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. ~ George Lakoff

America is not static. America is striving. And sometimes, America requires critique. Jingoism is an avoidance of realism. You can simultaneously love and be disappointed in the object of your love, wanting it to be better than it is. In fact, that is a measure of love. Honest critique is a pillar of patriotism. ~ Charles M. Blow

The inner lawyer, the rose-colored mirror, naive realism, and the myth of pure evil - these mechanisms all conspire to weave for us a web of significance upon which angels and demons fight it out. Our ever-judging minds then give us constant flashes of approval and disapproval, along with the certainty that we are on the side of the angels. From this vantage point it all seems so silly, all this moralism, righteousness, and hypocrisy. It's beyond silly; it is tragic, for it suggests that human beings will never achieve a state of lasting peace and harmony. ~ Jonathan Haidt

A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow. ~ John C. Maxwell

The good thing about writing a true story is that you don't have to worry about giving an impression of realism. ~ Laurent Binet

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare ... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism. ~ Arnaud Desplechin

I'm too big of a fan of sin and debauchery to be a Christian. ~ J.C. Wickhart

Conversation sprang up as to the elegance and realism of her acting -- the sort of conversation that is always repeated and is always the same. In the midst of the conversation Fedor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilych and became silent. The others also looked at him and grew silent. Ivan ~ Leo Tolstoy

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too. ~ Wynn Bullock

There is an instinct for realism, a powerful drive to reproduce oneself. The fascination of photorealistic paintings lies partly in their apparent replication of life, but these are not merely replications. These paintings are often out of life scale, varying from over life-size to under life-size, from brilliant, heightened color to pale, undertone hues. ~ Audrey Flack

The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. ~ George Lakoff

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate. ~ Lynne Tillman

In the Middle East, optimism is a virtue; realism – a duty. ~ Raphael Cohen-Almagor

Today, Democrats not only have the White House; they have the Senate too. So we have to be realistic about what we can and cannot achieve, while at the same recognizing that realism should never be confused with capitulation. ~ Mitch McConnell

I was doing something that the officials or art commission probably didn't consider important ... I was experimenting with different kinds of realistic art, impressionism and the more decorative compositions of different forms of painting, which took away from the earlier photographic realism that I was doing. ~ E. J. Hughes

He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ... ~ J.D. Salinger

For a moment, I'll just stand there, looking. Taking in the sight of so many familiar faces, the face of the mam I love. The person who taught me what it was to be honestly generous, to give without expectation or resentment. Whose steady demeanor and realism helped me to learn that attempting to achieve perfection with every decision is a sure path to unhappiness; that when it comes to choosing a house or a car or a television or a loaf of bread, good enough really is good enough. Whose cereal-slurping helped me learn that being irritated at someone isn't the same as ceasing to love him, a distinction that I know should be obvious but which has always troubled me. Who taught me that together is better than alone, even if it's sometimes harder, even if I sometimes forget. ~ Alexandra Oliva

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme
to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life. ~ Stefan Zweig

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning Ursula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end in a placid swoon and she had already asked them to take her to Father Antonio Isabel, when Santa Sofia de la Piedad discovered that her back was paved with leeches. She took them off one by one, crushing them with a firebrand before they bled her to death. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage. ~ Gurinder Chadha

Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves. ~ John Mearsheimer

Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible. ~ Fanny Britt

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism ~ Charles Eisenstein

Dreams are memories.
Memories are dreams.
But my time with you hasn't become a dream just yet.
Because the sensation of your kisses
keep me from sleep.
I'm in love,
God help me, I'm in love. ~ F.K. Preston

we can only re-establish metaphysics today by returning to realism pure and simple. ~ Etienne Gilson

A recent canvass of professional philosophers found the percentage of respondents who "accept or leans toward" various positions. On normative ethics, the results were deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%. On metaethics, results were moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%. On moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0% (Bourget and Chalmers 2009). ~ Nick Bostrom

After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Any power that doesn't give you benefit is not a power. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

Hyperrealism is more about objectifying ... how an object can be portrayed when it is seen through a camera's lens ... all my paintings are about an object being viewed through human eyes. ~ Liu Dan

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh new school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! If only you knew what Dorian Gray is to me! ~ Oscar Wilde

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you? ~ James Carville

And when Tolstoy found God his lines went limp, and Turgenev on his deathbed grieved for him because although Tolstoy had given up his land and his coppers for God, he had also given up something else. And although Dostoevski ended up on believing in Christ, he took the long road to get there, a most interesting and perhaps unwholesome road over roulette tables, raping a small child, standing before a wall waiting for the rifles to fire, he found that "adversity is the main-spring of self-realism," he found his Christ, but what a most interesting Christ, a self-made Christ, and I bow to him. ~ Charles Bukowski

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Don't be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in. ~ L.M. Montgomery

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all. ~ George W. Bush

What I've learned is that life is a balance between idealism and realism. ~ Peter Hook

At times all you need is a bottle of fine old wine, a mellifluous piece of music playing in the background and a good book to spend the entire night in a magical bliss! ~ Avijeet Das

Romance is overrated, realism it is. ~ Anna Todd

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists? ~ Vincent Van Gogh

The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains. ~ E. E. Cummings

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both. ~ Criss Jami

Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest. ~ Franz Grillparzer

I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel. ~ Walter Mosley

Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art. ~ Sherwood Anderson

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. ~ Mark Fisher

Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice's mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes. ~ Simon Avery

When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live. ~ Junot Diaz

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer. ~ Daniel Pinkwater

Best movie ever?! Come on, my appearance on Arrested Development had more dynamics, realism and feel to it than the whole trilogy combined. ~ Zach Braff

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for. ~ NikNak

My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker. ~ Rick Moody

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires.
Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of th ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

Poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs. ~ Flannery O'Connor

It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein. ~ Eva Hoffman

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you'll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we're bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we're good. And real-world policy - policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families - is being built on that foundation. ~ Paul Krugman

Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity
a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit
is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices. ~ Jack London

As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves. ~ Matthew Scully

If you see yourself as a man, no one will dare to see you as a kid. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' ~ Cathleen Schine

Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing. ~ Lynn Flewelling

And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye. ~ James Kelman

The underlying melody via every rock, plant, animal, sky and star, inside the water, from the dirt, through the light: only love lasts. ~ Melina Sempill Watts

I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components. ~ Robert Reynolds

The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. ~ Mark Fisher

You cannot seek for the ideal outside the realm of reality. ~ Leon Blum

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power," forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls "realism."
Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution ... One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. ~ Paulo Freire

Carry on the Flame to a new dawn I am with you.
~the Goddess of the Stars and the Sea ~ Jodine Turner

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as "escapist" literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening. ~ A.A. Milne

It is easier to start a war than to end it. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sex sells & the small print will kill you ~ Phillip McCarron

As an evil cultist, I make an excellent evil cultist. Only I'm stupid, and not evil. And I worship nothing, really. ~ Will Advise

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. ~ John Barth

There are two types of men when it comes to approaching lone pretty women in bars. The shit type and the don't-have-the-balls-to-be-a-shit jealous type, and I was the latter and in situations like this the prey becomes the hunter and it's all just an under-stocked meat market trading in egos, tits and shame. ~ John Bowie

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he wrote in Diplomacy, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable. ~ Walter Isaacson

I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation. ~ Ray Bradbury

Among religious writings the Bible is unique in its attitude to its great men. Even many Christian biographies puff up the men they describe. But the Bible exhibits the whole man, so much so that it is almost embarrassing at times. If we would teach our children to read the Bible truly, it would be a good vaccination against cynical realism from the non-Christian side, because the Bible portrays its characters as honestly as any debunker or modern cynic ever could. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. ~ Colin Feltham

When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

The heat inside me became liquid fire. ~ Lindsey S. Frantz

My thesis in terms of all my art is finding the beauty in the ugly truth. Just find the beauty in realism and what's there. ~ Nikki Jean

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. ~ F.K. Preston

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one's security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory. ~ Robert Gilpin

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. ~ Ella Leya

In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown. ~ Mary Grandpre

Religions have no merit for me
Any new religion we created
Brought upon countless discord
Amplifying Hatred and Animosity
The Crusades recurred
Human blood covered the earth, time and again in the name of faith
I am neither Muslim, nor Christian nor Jew
I follow the command of rationale
Rationale decrees that the ultimate pleasure is in coexistence
Religion on the other hand promises eternal reward by shedding the blood of unfaithful
Different thinkers are human too
Why does religion promote their killing?
I shall not shed the blood of fellow humans
This is the reason for my lack of faith
I have nothing to do with religion!"

As for you, my son:
"Follow your rationale to reach the pinnacle
Befriend all humans on earth
This is the ultimate faith. ~ Rumi

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances. ~ George Saunders

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. ~ Crispin Glover

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Denying realism amounts to megalomania. ~ Karl R. Popper

When the emergency brappers went of they did what any dedicated, well-trained and quick-minded Service personnel would do; they paniced.

From the short story What Makes Us Human. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson

All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind. ~ Johan Huizinga

Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale. ~ Mason Cooley