Realism Quotes - Page 13

• Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Real, Color, Black

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• We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

  Jo Nesbo

  Cutting, Understanding, Bombs

  Jo Nesbo (2010). “The Snowman: Harry Hole 7”, p.245, Random House

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• Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hero, Book, Mean

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• Delicious... Everything I'd hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise, and unsentimental realism I'd expect out of a George R. R. Martin project.

  Austin Grossman

  Book, Character, Twists

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• Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Real, Men, Play

  "Dirty Hands". Play by Jean-Paul Sartre (Act 4, Scene 6), April 2, 1948.

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• Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Choices

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Thinking

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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• Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Dream, Country, Real

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion”, p.1242, e-artnow

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• I have nothing but the embittered sun;
  Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
  And now that I have come to fifty years
  I must endure the timid sun.

  William Butler Yeats

  Mother, Moon, Reality

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.109, Library of Alexandria

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• While on that old grey stone I sat
  Under the old wind-broken tree,
  I knew that One is animate,
  Mankind inanimate phantasy.

  William Butler Yeats

  Reality, Wind, Broken

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.161, Wordsworth Editions

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• Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
  For each an imagined image brings
  And finds a real image there...

  William Butler Yeats

  Marriage, Real, Despair

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.132, Library of Alexandria

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• Gaze no more in the bitter glass
  The demons, with their subtle guile,
  Lift up before us when they pass,
  Or only gaze a little while.

  William Butler Yeats

  Reality, Glasses, Mirrors

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.139, Penguin

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• That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

  William James

  Independent, Mean, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.27, 谷月社

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• Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

  William James

  Reality, Ideas, Giving

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.74, 谷月社

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• No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.

  Mark Twain

  Real, Men, Madness

  Mark Twain (1992). “The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories”, p.116, Courier Corporation

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• In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Reality, Air, Facts

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• When "reality" is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeableemotional state.

  John Dewey

  Reality, Intellectual, Connotation

  John Dewey, Larry Hickman, Thomas M. Alexander (1998). “The Essential Dewey: Pragmatism, education, democracy”, p.209, Indiana University Press

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• You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

  George Santayana

  Philosophy, Heart, Reality

  Durant Drake, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur Kenyon Rogers, George Santayana (1920). “Essays in critical realism: a co-operative study of the problem of knowledge”

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• All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.

  Herman Melville

  Beautiful, Lying, Reality

  Herman Melville (2015). “Pierre or The Ambiguities: Works of Melville”, p.214, 谷月社

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• The magnificent cause of being,
  The imagination, the one reality
  In this imagined world.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Imagination, World

  Wallace Stevens (2012). “The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Other Poems”, p.66, Courier Corporation

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• How cold the vacancy
  When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
  First sees reality. The mortal no
  Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Vacancy, Gone

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.331, Vintage

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• The physical world is meaningless tonight
  And there is no other.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Tonight, World

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

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• Of what is real I say,
  Is it the old, the roseate parent or
  The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
  The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

  Wallace Stevens

  Real, Self, Parent

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.308, Vintage

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