Romantics Versus Realists Quotes

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. ~ Hermann Hesse

Isn't that how all romantics are, give love a chance? That was the sole basis of every romance novel out there; give love a chance. ~ Meghan Quinn

Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

It's time that we acknowledge the wisdom women have acquired by managing the chaos of daily life. Women are realists, the glue that holds society together. They bring a reverence to life that's instinctual, not just intellectual. ~ Teresa Heinz

You can't do a machine without knowing something about how it's going to work. As for the romantics, the costumes bored me and I don't enjoy doing period clothes. ~ Boris Vallejo

I have met otherwise educated folks who haven't heard that cooked bones can kill a dog, so perhaps the vets are just being realists. ~ Carina MacDonald

Erotic Romance authors are just hopeless romantics with a dirty mind. ~ Audri Nichols

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. ~ Jonathan Raban

America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists. ~ Dortha Jackson

The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and - the crowning touch - a one-amred amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquianted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful. ~ Roberto Bolano

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. ~ Albert Camus

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me ... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it ... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists. ~ Stephen Hawking

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars. ~ Paul Virilio

Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor what
should possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization. ~ Lars Fredrik Händler Svendsen

Shakespare was one of the few philosophers who believed in revenge. Then again, he was a romantic. Romantics always believe in revenge, because romantics love harder, suffer loss more painfully, and hold onto a grudge that has shattered their hearts. Their hearts are of the greatest importance, above all else - body, soul, or mind. ~ S.T. Abby

It isn't a circle
it is simply a long line
as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end
we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes
who dream, who will not give up
are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

The real romantics imagine greying and sagging and wrinkling as the deepening of something sacred. ~ Ann Voskamp

Romantics. This book does contain some romantic ideas, and romantic situations that are of the heart, nothing that is in anyway X rated, not even R. But definitely a bit of romance. ~ Kevin Moccia

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime. ~ Jeanette Winterson

All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics. ~ William Blake

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively. ~ M.H. Abrams

CHORUS OF NIGHT VOICES
Come out, come out, wherever you are, you dreamers and drowners, you loafers and losers, you shadow-seekers and orphans of the sun. Come out, come out, you flops and fizzler, you good-for-nothings and down-and-outers, a day's outcasts, dark's little darlin's. Come on, all you who are misbegotten and woebegone, all you with black thoughts and red-fever-visions, come on, you small-town Ishmaels with your sad blue eyes, you plain Janes and hard-luck guys, come, you gripers and groaners, you goners and loners, you sad sack and shlemiels, come on, come on, you pale romantics and pie-eye Palookas, you has-beens and never-will-bes, you sun-mocked and day-doomed denizens of the dar: come out into the night. ~ Steven Millhauser

Without so much as turning a hair I freely admit that I am one of America's greatest realists. ~ Thorne Smith

Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march. ~ George W. Bush

There are two kinds of romantics, my older cousin had explained, the kind who is constantly falling in love and simply needs a person into whom they can pour every thought, dream, and project, and the kind of romantic who remains alone, waiting and waiting for the right person to arrive, a person who may not even exist. It was too early to know which kind I would be. ~ Chloe Aridjis

Everything about them is blighted, dead. Feelings flake off & fall in dust. The senses, vitrified, can no longer experience pleasure; they crack at the least provocation. Each of us, within, was as if devoured by conflagration, & our hearts were no more than a pinch of ashes. Our souls were laid waste. For a long time now we had believed in nothing, not even nothingness. The nihilists of 1880 were a sect of mystics, dreamers, the routineers of universal happiness. We, of course, were poles apart from these credulous fools & their vaporous theories. We were men of action, technicians, specialists, the pioneers of a modern generation dedicated to death, the preachers of world revolution, the precursors of universal destruction, realists, realists. And there is no reality. What then? Destroy to rebuild or destroy to destroy? Neither the one nor the other. Angels or devils? No. You must excuse my smile: we were automats, pure & simple. We ran on like an idling machine until we were exhausted, pointlessly pointlessly, like life, like death, like a dream. Not even adversity had any charm for us. ~ Blaise Cendrars

It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life. ~ William McFee

Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. ~ Robert D. Kaplan

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.

　　All that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.

There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's beak! They seem l ~ John Cowper Powys

Opportunists are promoted, realists are co-opted, idealists are frightened and radicals are shot. ~ Heather Marsh

During the twenty-one year rule of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Egypt.

Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen- the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans- for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honour. These cliches about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Cynics are simply thwarted romantics. ~ William Goldman

Nature as a means of reproduction is important for these intellectual workers because the specialisation and one-sidedness of their work generates psychological instability and requires periods of complete relaxation without jarring sensorial stimuli (noise, media, social contacts). Nature is the most efficient compensation for intellectual stress since it represents the unity of body and mind against the capitalist division of labour. Extensive consumption of nature has traditionally been an element of the re-production of intellectual workers. (It started with Rousseau, then came the Romantics, Thoreau, the early tourists, Tolstoi, artists' colonies in the Alps, etc). The ecological movement responds directly to the class interests of the intellectual sector of the proletariat and the struggle against nuclear power plants is a mere extension of this struggle. ~ Anonymous

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know. ~ Martin Scorsese