Realism Quotes - Page 9

• 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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• No poetic phantasy
  but a biological reality,
  a fact: I am an entity
  like bird, insect, plant
  or sea-plant cell;
  I live; I am alive.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Life, Reality, Cells

  Hilda Doolittle (1988). “Selected Poems”, p.172, New Directions Publishing

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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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• Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.

  Mason Cooley

  Home, Reality, Comfort

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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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• What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Mean, Reality

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• The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

  Mason Cooley

  Real, Facts, Reality

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• Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.

  Mason Cooley

  Reality, Garden, White

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• The real reality is always just around the corner.

  Mason Cooley

  Real, Corners, Around The Corner

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• ... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Life, Reality, Earth

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• I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

  Norman Mailer

  Children, Real, War

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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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• Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Reality, Self, Cognition

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1991). “Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic”, p.50, UNC Press Books

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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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• The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Real, Mean, Fate

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1991). “Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic”, p.177, UNC Press Books

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• All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Truth, Real, Mean

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Morris Raphael Cohen, John Dewey (1968). “Chance, love, and logic philosophical essays”, p.306, Charles Sander Peirce

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.

  Samuel Beckett

  Reality, Space, Might

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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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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• 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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