Realism Quotes - Page 7

• Art, to me is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word 'Impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. [...] The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. They take the ready-made axioms laid down by others, and walk blindly in a rut without trying to see for themselves.

  Childe Hassam

  Art, Eye, Acceptance

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• 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

  Photography, Real, Unique

  Wynn Bullock, Barbara Bullock-Wilson (1984). “Wynn Bullock, photographing the nude: the beginnings of a quest for meaning”, Gibbs Smith

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• Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.

  Zane Grey

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• Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

  William T. Vollmann

  Religious, Angel, Letters

  William T Vollmann (2005). “Europe Central”, p.36, Penguin

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• You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

  Bill Gates

  Fall, Government, People

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• Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, Confusing, Details

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.22, Hudson Hills

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• There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.

  Jean Renoir

  Film, American Film

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• Gorecki, you know, there's a kind of personal thing there for me. I had, you know, kind of become obsessed with that sort of Soviet Bloc period. And actually, a lot of composers in the Soviet Bloc - Gorecki's not the only one - are writing for the harpsichord as a sort of reaction against enforced Soviet realism, expressionism, sort of enforced modernism.

  Mahan Esfahani

  Writing, Kind, Obsessed

  "How To Annoy Your Dad: Play The Harpsichord". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

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• Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

  George Saunders

  Erosion, Grace, Intellectual

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.27, A&C Black

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• Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

  Andre Bazin

  Writing, Mean, Reality

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• Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.

  Lucy Corin

  People, Stories, Toss

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

  David Foster Wallace

  Saws, Seeing, Ifs

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, p.30, Hachette UK

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• I like romance, I like glamour and I like realism. I think that's a great combination.

  Ralph Lauren

  Thinking, Romance, Glamour

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• Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

  Lin Yutang

  Dream, Heart, Animal

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

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• Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Simple, Law, Unseen

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.73, North Atlantic Books

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• Any first-order, substantive normative theory worth its salt will require attention to the mental states of agents in a variety of quite complex ways. But realism, being a view about the status of such normative theories, insists that the truth of any firstorder normative standard is not a function of what anyone happens to think of it.

  Russ Shafer-Landau

  Thinking, Views, Order

  Russ Shafer-Landau (2003). “Moral Realism: A Defence”, p.15, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

  Fred Thompson

  Witty, Years, Two

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It is impossible to discuss realism in logic without drawing in the empirical sciences... A truly realistic mathematics should be conceived, in line with physics, as a branch of the theoretical construction of the one real world and should adopt the same sober and cautious attitude toward hypothetic extensions of its foundation as is exhibited by physics.

  Hermann Weyl

  Attitude, Real, Drawing

  Hermann Weyl, Frank Wilczek (2009). “Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science”, p.235, Princeton University Press

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• Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism...[because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

  Price Pritchett

  Moving, Ambition, Goal

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• There's a level of realism you can only achieve through the imaginary.

  Fumito Ueda

  Writing, Levels, Achieve

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• Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Reality, Facts, Spirit

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• Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Real, Writing, Would Be

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2687, Delphi Classics

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• The realism of failure, the romance of success.

  Mason Cooley

  Reality, Romance

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• In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Photography, Reality, Objectivity

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