Top 100 The Realist Quotes
#1. Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.
Jack McDevitt
#2. I was ever the realist, sometimes to my sorrow. But seldom to my regret.
Margaret George
#3. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward
#4. The realist lies for advantage. The fantasist lies to give his dreams a flavor of reality.
Mason Cooley
#5. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#6. The warming springtime of human hope does not give in to the wintry smiles of the cynic and the realist; it blossoms and it perishes in the sad autumnal winds. And then it is born again - for ever and ever.
Richard Stites
#7. World unity is the wish of the hopeful, the goal of the idealist and the dream of the romantic. Yet it is folly to the realist and a lie to the innocent.
Don Williams
#8. Pooley the realist pooh-poohed such notions, but Pooley the mystic, dreamer and romantic sensed the aura of pagan mystery which surrounded the crop-headed man.
Robert Rankin
#9. The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel.
Sydney J. Harris
#10. In the realist, you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination.
Robert Breault
#11. Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#12. Where the realist would say, "One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach," the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact.
John Gardner
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up with, the romanticist with a girl from 'off somewhere.
Robert Frost
#17. A moral vision must be balanced by the realist dimension of prudence to have a reasonable prospect of success.
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
#18. 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
#19. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#20. 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
#21. In love' is for the romantic. 'Love' for the realist.
Nancy Spain
#22. To my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief ... Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#23. Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist.
Haruki Murakami
#24. The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay.
Robert Breault
#25. The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real
but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible.
Hakim Bey
#26. From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
Wallace Stevens
#27. I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.
John Barth
#28. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#29. The most important thing taught to my students is to not be so photo realist in what they depict.
Frank Bruno
#30. realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!
David Nicholls
#31. I'm no optimist", she said as she opened the cabinet door. " I'm just a realist who smiles too much.
Tiffany Reisz
#32. An idealist believes that the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. - Sydney J. Harris
David Allen
#33. A realist is a man who insists on making the same mistakes his grandfather did.
Benjamin Disraeli
#34. I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
Paul Auster
#35. A mystic is a spiritual realist, a person for whom the Invisible is a matter of more or less firsthand experience.
Frances Parkinson Keyes
#36. America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists.
Dortha Jackson
#37. A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
Beau Willimon
#38. I would love to be on a Real Housewives from somewhere reality show. Then I could show all those women how the rest of our society gets to do it.
Heather Chapple
#39. 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
#40. While I support a more comprehensive bill and hope a more extensive package will eventually past the Senate, I also am a realist and know that we must not let the perfect bill be the enemy of real reform.
John McCain
#41. He was realist enough to know he might never find the life partner he longed for, and dreamer enough not to quit looking
Eden Winters
#42. So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
Jean Baudrillard
#43. All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
David Mitchell
#44. I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.
Joyce Carol Oates
#45. The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round.
James S.A. Corey
#46. Just that I'm not a realist,' he said, and then: 'No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#47. Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.
Gerhard Richter
#48. The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
Cormac McCarthy
#49. I have a theory that as human beings get older, chemicals are released into the brain to prepare us for the end. Sort of like how the nurse lubes your ass up before the anus-cam. It makes the whole thing a lot easier to swallow. Easier, not enjoyable.
Kris D'Agostino
#50. Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail. On the horizon I saw the shining future, as before. The difference now was that I felt the wind at my back. I was ready.
Chris Gardner
#51. Of course, that's one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We're still waiting for the results.
Charles Finch
#52. Despite the mythic heights to which he was raised, Azikiwe was nothing if not pragmatic, a realist always conscious of his limits and ever eager to extract all that was possible from that limited horizon.
Nnamdi Azikiwe
#53. She [Samantha Lyle] was a realist, someone who knew choices were meant to be made, and that one must suffer the consequences of those choices, no matter what they were.
Ayr Bray
#54. [The Devil] And after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: 'I'm a realist,' I'll say, 'not a materialist,' heh, heh!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#55. The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me.
Richard Bausch
#56. The positive thinker is a hard-headed, tough-minded, and factual realist. He sees all the difficulties clearly ... which is more than can be said for the average negative thinker. But he sees more than difficulties - he tries to see the solutions of those difficulties.
Norman Vincent Peale
#57. As we progress into the twenty-first century, anyone who considers themselves a realist will have to make the environment a top priority.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#58. The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.
Emile Zola
#59. The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism
Charles Eisenstein
#60. You get to a certain age and you're just glad to be there. I don't know what to add to that. It's fun. You have to be a realist, so you try to look for roles that are within the age you are.
Clint Eastwood
#61. An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Sydney J. Harris
#62. Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#63. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.
Cormac McCarthy
#67. The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Benjamin Graham
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.
Tom Hiddleston
#73. 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
#74. I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.
Morgan Spurlock
#75. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
#76. I'm a realist. Just because you had sex once doesn't mean you have to fall in love.
Candace Bushnell
#77. 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
#78. An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
Peter Drucker
#79. 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
#80. One - about cigarettes - I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life - and I think that's an important difference.
Paul Krassner
#81. Empathy and a huge imagination explain a lot of mysteries in the universe.
Shannon L. Alder
#82. 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
#83. The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history - the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen
Robert Greene
#84. 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
#85. Magical Realist writer write the ordinary as miraculous and the miraculous as ordinary.
Bruce Holland Rogers
#86. When a man comes to your house with a bag full of money, he certainly has seen more in your backyard than in the bag.
M.F. Moonzajer
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn't win the race. I am a realist.
Jean Alesi
#90. The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.
Patrick Ness
#91. DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.
Eugene Ionesco
#92. Dear optimist, pessimist, and realist
while you guys were busy arguing about the glass of wine, I drank it! Sincerely, the opportunist!
Lori Greiner
#93. 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
#94. The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.
Jean Piaget
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The endurance athlete is the ultimate realist.
Marty Liquori
#99. Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.
Jo Walton
#100. 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
