Short Realistic Quotes

Be realistic and truthful - and tell Hong Kong businessmen honestly that they should go for long-term investments since it is unlikely money can be made in the short haul. ~ Zhu Rongji

They who plead an absolute right cannot be satisfied with anything short of personal representation, because all natural rights must be the rights of individuals; as by nature there is no such thing as politic or corporate personality; all these things are mere fictions of law, they are creatures of voluntary institution; men as men are individuals, and nothing else. They, therefore, who reject the principle of natural and personal representation, are essentially and eternally at variance with those who claim it. As to the first sort of reformers, it is ridiculous to talk to them of the British constitution upon any or upon all of its bases; for they lay it down that every man ought to govern himself, and that where he cannot go himself he must send his representative; that all other government is usurpation; and is so far from having a claim to our obedience, it is not only our right, but our duty, to resist it. ~ Edmund Burke

I'm having my lunch when I hear a familiar hoarse shout, 'Oy Tony!' I whip round, damaging my neck further, to see Michael Gambon in the lunch queue. …

Gambon tells me the story of Olivier auditioning him at the Old Vic in 1962. His audition speech was from Richard III. 'See, Tone, I was thick as two short planks then and I didn't know he'd had a rather notable success in the part. I was just shitting myself about meeting the Great Man. He sussed how green I was and started farting around.'

As reported by Gambon, their conversation went like this:

Olivier: 'What are you going to do for me?'

Gambon: 'Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'Is that so. Which part?'

Gambon: 'Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'Yes, but which part?'

Gambon: 'Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'Yes, I understand that, but which part?'

Gambon: 'Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'But which character? Catesby? Ratcliffe? Buckingham's a good part …'

Gambon: 'Oh I see, beg your pardon, no, Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'What, the King? Richard?'

Gambon: ' - the Third, yeah.'

Olivier: "You've got a fucking cheek, haven't you?'

Gambon: 'Beg your pardon?'

Olivier: 'Never mind, which part are you going to do?'

Gambon: 'Richard the Third.'

Olivier: 'Don't start that again. Which speech?'

Gambon: 'Oh I see, beg your p ~ Antony Sher

Becky was a weed. Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants. People went to all extremes to make them go away. They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt only like their garden was complete when every tendril was extirpated. This was how she felt from birth. ~ Ruth McLeod-Kearns

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short ... if one follows patterns. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Here's to a tasty lunch, she says, winking at me.
It's the strangest thing, but I actually feel my body respond to her. Beneath their lace prison, my nipples harden and send a jolt of arousal across my midriff and down to my thighs. I take a long sip of champagne and eye Rachel hungrily. I can't be sure if it's the alcohol or the company but I already feel giddy. ~ Felicity Brandon

Who would have thought God would send a bad man and a sheriff just to save Prince? ~ Debra Holland

One thing I have always been is too short. It's adorable when you're in junior high. After that, it's a pain in the ass for the rest of your life. ~ Elizabeth Berg

The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Last week I wrote that the reason Hollywood films are so bad last 10 years is that all the better scriptwriters were hired by the Pentagon. Today in the news: Pentagon refused to cooperate with movie 'Avengers' for it found its script 'not realistic enough'. ~ Martijn Benders

Being resolute today means to act within the framework of political and social pluralism and the rule of law to provide conditions for continued reform and prevent a breakdown of the state and economic collapse, prevent the elements of chaos from becoming catastrophic.
All this requires taking certain tactical steps, to search for various ways of addressing both short- and long-term tasks. Such efforts and political and economic steps, agreements based on reasonable compromise, are there for everyone to see. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

You're just a character in my dream."
"You wish."
"I didn't mean my love interest," she replied defensively. "You'd have better hair. You're the character I dreamed up because the rest of the dream was making me homesick."
"Maybe you're the character I dreamed up to scare myself awake."
"That's not very nice!"
"You made fun of my hair. I like it this way. Short and simple."
I don't mind short. Mine is short."
"Then what's wrong with mine?" Jason challenged.
"Maybe we should talk about something else."
"Like the guy on a horse coming to kill us?"
"It needs more style," she muttered.
"The horse?"
"Your hair."
"I forgot to bring my gel when I got eaten by a hippo. ~ Brandon Mull

Zane didn't reply immediately. After a short pause he spoke quietly.
"I'll warn you, I'm going to be grouchy as my back really starts hurting."
"And I'll be on the lookout for that major change of attitude," Ty
responded sarcastically. ~ Madeleine Urban

You can change the exterior in a fairly short period of time, but the heart takes a whole lot longer. ~ Suzanne Supplee

Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied "For praise." Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it's hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt.
A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe. ~ James Salter

Have you ever seen Russian nesting dolls?"
Thrown by the questions, she opened her eyes. Why would he suddenly speak about a child's toy? "I own a few of them."
"Then you must understand that undressing you is like playing with one of those dolls. I open one to find another beneath it. I took away your gown to find you are still as clothed as you were a moment ago and I wonder how many more layers I will have to work through to get down to you - the doll I'm searching for. ~ Dominique Eastwick

I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think nothing better than these long slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost o sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but still with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life. ~ Fernando Pessoa

A fat person lives shorter but eats longer. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs. ~ Chris Cleave

The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive. ~ Kurt Hahn

Your gift to the world is your purpose, you must find it, not for them, but for you.
They will live on regardless of who you are, but you will remember who you felt short of, trying to please them. The only gift that the world needs is more, awakened beings, ready to be themselves, to unite a community to do the same; everywhere & that is the gift, to rise to your greatness & help others do the same. ~ Nikki Rowe

She is waiting for me when I step outside of school at the end of the day, her sturdy frame standing by the passenger door of my papaw's small truck, waving. Yes,waving-ildly, with both arms in the air,and catching herself on the door when she loses her balance.
Mortified,I attempt a nonchalant wave to the other girls on my squad. Practice actually went well today.I like the girls and I'm on top of all the pyraminds, which is cool.
What is not cool is my grandmother shouting my name and motioning at me like an escaped mental patient who has taken a day job landing planes.I sprint over to their truck, which is parked diagonally across to handicapped spots, as quickly as I can.
"I'm here, gosh! Stop yelling," I say.
"Comee here, baby," she says, and before I know it, she's pressing me against her massive bosom in a bear hug, slapping my back and cooing into my ear. "You're Mamaw's baby, ain't ya? Yes, Mamaw's sure happy to see you."
There is no escape.Because I am too short and scrawny and no match for her brute grandchild-love strength, I wait it out. ~ Alecia Whitaker

It is far easier to debate about realistic painting than to paint one. ~ Igor Babailov

When loved ones die, people always say, "Don't be sad. I'm sure they would have wanted you to be happy." I'm sure that's true. But let's be realistic here, people also want to be missed. It is every person's nightmare to leave the world behind as if they had never been there at all. ~ Esther Earl

She turned to him, shook her head. Her black hair tossed, and the beams of the late-afternoon sunlight played upon it, sending brief ripples of red and green and blue through it the same way that light, shimmering on the black surface of oil, creates short-lived, wriggling rainbows. ~ Dean Koontz

Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead. ~ Brooke Warra

I invited Onyx to be my plus one. Of course she was all in when I added that Grandma A had a massive swimming pool and was within a short driving distance to a two-story bookstore. ~ K.R. Grace

Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Life's too short. I'm not! ~ Kristin Chenoweth

Our life is sweet, short, and bright. We have enough moments to enjoy the delights of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Men and women run away from every goal, whether worldly or spiritual, because they overestimate the initial task. The proper way is a bit at a time. It is the same if someone eats too much; they should diminish it daily by a small bit, gradually. In that way, before a year or two have passed, they will have cut down what they eat by half, reducing it in such a way that their body does not notice. So it is with worship, withdrawing into solitude, attending to the service of God, and prayer. When a person enters upon the Way of God, for a while their prayers will be short. But after that, if they pray with their whole heart, their prayers will go on and on without end. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud. ~ Lisa Halliday

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it. ~ Neil Gaiman

Her short path through life had been written and it was not her right to know the meaning, only the outcome. ~ Stuart Land

I met my husband, Will Smith, when I was 19 and auditioned to be his date on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.' They said I was too short to play the part. ~ Jada Pinkett Smith

Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis - the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being - regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother. ~ Sean McDowell

The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

Interpreters, and have in a short time considered themselves superior to their masters. This was the case with Ficinus, Picus, Dr, Plenry Moore, and other psucdo Platonists, their contemporaries, who, in order to combine Christianity with the doctrines of Plato, rejected some of his most important tenets, and perverted others, and thus corrupted one of these systems, and afforded no real benefit to the other. ~ Anonymous

He hung up and glanced at me. "I'm sorry, I have to take care of business. It can't wait, but I'll keep it short."
"Not a problem. I'll busy myself with being seen and tossing my hair. Would you like me to twirl it on my finger while biting my lip?"
"Could you?"
"No, sorry." I grinned at him ~ Ilona Andrews

Recently, I went up to Casino Rama to see Martin Short's show, just to see how he put it all together. And after the show, I went backstage and picked his brain to find out why he did certain things. ~ Trish Stratus

There is a fear of peace that I don't understand. Witness the old epithet "peaceniks," the association of peace with weakness. We mistake kindness for weakness in individuals, too. Gandhi found the essence of Christianity to be gentleness, the exaltation of means over ends. Using violence, against us or them, to achieve peace is like beating children to get them to be good. It only works in the short term. Believe in peace, think peace, live peace. Be a building-block of peace. Make it the center of your strength. ~ Jennifer James