Top 100 Realist Quotes
#1. I like to think I'm some savage realist.
Nick Frost
#3. I am both a realist and a student of History. Mankind has never learned from History.
Philippe De Montebello
#4. Poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs.
Flannery O'Connor
#5. Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#6. You just can't get anything done. You can't get hearings, you can't get legislation, you can't get responses by the regulatory agencies - you can't get anything done. I'm a realist. I don't work harder and harder to get less and less.
Ralph Nader
#7. It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#8. I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.
Wolfgang Petersen
#9. I like presenting ambiguous situations. It seems to me a great part of our inner and outer lives are ambiguous, if we're honest about it. Maybe I'm a realist, in that respect.
Eric Basso
#10. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#11. I'm a realist all the way. I'm too cynical to be an optimist. But I've lived too much of a charmed life so far to ever be a pessimist.
Anthony Jeselnik
#12. I think I probably hoped for it a little bit, but I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist ... or maybe even a pessimist.
Clay Aiken
#13. Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.
Leni Zumas
#14. I'm not an idealist anymore, I'm a bitter realist.
Soe Hok Gie
#15. The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Benjamin Graham
#16. I'm much more of a realist. I'm really practical. I'm the kind of person that calls my business manager and says, OK, if it were all to end today, how many months do I have to live?
Courteney Cox
#17. I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will.
Octavia Spencer
#18. My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organization is the assignment of the realist painter.
Ralph Goings
#21. You can cooperate and not compromise your core values. But I'm a realist with the philosophy that sometimes you've got to take bites out of the apple instead of the whole apple.
Jason T. Smith
#23. The pessimist looks down and hits his head. The optimist looks up and loses his footing. The realist looks forward and adjusts his path accordingly.
Robert Kirkman
#24. Jesus Christ was the Master Realist when He urged men to prepare for death, which was certain to come. Do not worry, said the Lord Jesus, about the death of the body, but rather concern yourself with the eternal death of the soul.
Billy Graham
#25. I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.
Tom Hiddleston
#26. It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.
Karen Russell
#27. 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
#29. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.
George Carlin
#30. It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#31. I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.
Morgan Spurlock
#32. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
#33. The realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up with, the romanticist with a girl from 'off somewhere.
Robert Frost
#34. A moral vision must be balanced by the realist dimension of prudence to have a reasonable prospect of success.
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
#35. If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.
John Barth
#36. What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.
Steven Millhauser
#37. There's evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid.
Dean Koontz
#38. I'm pretty much a realist. There's a certain age you get to when you're not really going to be shown anymore.
Moby
#39. I'm a realist and I always have been. Quality training is what I do now; before it was a combination of both quality and quantity. Now I'm not trying to be a world-class athlete, I don't need to train at that level. It's about being fit, fit for life.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
#40. I'm a realist. Just because you had sex once doesn't mean you have to fall in love.
Candace Bushnell
#41. What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.
Gore Vidal
#42. I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing.
Steven Morrissey
#43. I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.
Kevin Barry
#44. The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Colm Toibin
#45. I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.
Malcolm X
#46. An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
Peter Drucker
#47. I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist.
Bill Maher
#48. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#49. A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.
Arthur Symons
#50. I can be fairly optimistic, but I'm probably more a realist, I think. I mean, optimism's an interesting quality, isn't it, because I'm always slightly dubious as to what's behind it?
Guy Pearce
#51. I suggest that it is the honesty of the attempt to recreate the forms and spaces visually without artistic editing that is one of the hallmarks of realist painting.
Philip Pearlstein
#52. Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing ... Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.
Alex Katz
#53. I am a mixture of idealist and realist.
Roger Moore
#55. Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.").
Terry Pratchett
#56. Whenever I am in my videos, it's rare. A lot of it is, they feel more live and hyper-realist, rather than fantasy. People would just be like, "Oh, Skrillex is acting in this video," and it wouldn't work as well.
Skrillex
#57. In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.
Michel Houellebecq
#58. Someone told me I'm a cynical fatalist but I prefer the term realist.
Wade Kelly
#59. He was a romantic in his own harsh way ... yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.
Stephen King
#60. I'm a realist, not a sugar coater. I believe in always letting people know what their obstacles are. And at the end of the day, I just want to be respected for my hard work.
Tichina Arnold
#62. Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks.
Kathryn Schulz
#63. A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?
Michael Shaara
#64. People normally view my work as fantasy, which on some level is true, but I do think that my work is more magical realist than fantasy. I believe in the fantasies within each of our realities, i.e., I portray very relatable human issues in a very realistic tone, yet in a magical setting.
Shahad Ameen
#65. The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay.
Robert Breault
#67. I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change.
Joseph Conrad
#68. Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn't true, would you hit him or smile? That's how easy it is to tell.
Alexei Panshin
#69. Looking for a saviour in the sky? Be serious! Know you still not that there ain't any saviour but science! Get rid of your cultural craps and your religious illusions! Be realist! In this universe, only the realists have the chance to save themselves!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#70. I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.
Joseph Roth
#71. Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist.
Haruki Murakami
#72. The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
Kate Forsyth
#73. Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.
Jo Walton
#74. Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
Margaret Atwood
#76. Man and wife, realist and dreamer ... n truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had ONE STORY between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it.
Lorna Sage
#77. I'm a realist," I said. "Lying and making promises about forever is almost as bad as one day at a time.
Nicole Williams
#79. I've never really played everyday people. I've played realist roles, but not mere daily life. There was always something incredible happening to my characters.
Sandrine Bonnaire
#80. The endurance athlete is the ultimate realist.
Marty Liquori
#81. When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I'm a little bit more of a realist now. I think there's a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it's more about choosing your battles.
Conor Oberst
#82. A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
Mary McCarthy
#83. When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.
David Coverdale
#84. I'm a realist," I replied stubbornly, "not a romantic. Romantics
are always disappointed."
"Maybe they're disappointed because they're always surrounded
by realists." Simon countered.
Amanda Howells
#85. In love' is for the romantic. 'Love' for the realist.
Nancy Spain
#86. The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.
Tony Kushner
#87. Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.
C. JoyBell C.
#88. You may choose to live in a world of fantasy if you like, my dear, but I am a realist.
Ransom Riggs
#89. First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.
Ellen Glasgow
#91. There's probably no one who's more of a realist than the unpopular loner. I have lived my life with the Three Nevers of the Unpopular: Never to hold (hope), Never to open (your heart), and Never to treasure (sweet words).
Wataru Watari
#92. I wish I had more control, more like Edgar Rice Burroughs had, but I'm a realist, too. I work in television. I don't know that I would want to spend the rest of my life controlling my characters.
Gene Roddenberry
#93. Magical Realist writer write the ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary.
Bruce Holland Rogers
#94. I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.
Jonathan Maberry
#95. I am ... a realist. The magnitude of what one terms license or civil liberties or personal freedom has got to be adjusted to the circumstances.
Lee Kuan Yew
#96. 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
#97. I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.
Todd Gitlin
#98. I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn't win the race. I am a realist.
Jean Alesi
#99. People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist.
Joan Baez
#100. I don't personally consider myself Dr. Doom. I call myself Dr. Realist, even though it's less exciting and more boring than being called Dr. Doom. If you are consistently saying 'the world is going to end,' who is going to listen to you?
Nouriel Roubini
