Realism Quotes

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one. (Morris Raphael Cohen)

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Jean Cocteau

Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.

Claude McKay

I don't want realism. I want magic!

Tennessee Williams

I often say after eight years in Washington, I longed for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

Manuel Puig

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

Dawn Powell

We need realism to deal with reality.

Slick Rick

I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.

Kazimir Malevich

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

Antoni Tàpies

You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too. (Irvine Welsh)

There are two ways of confronting the country's problems. One is through a management style based on adventurism, instability, play-acting, exaggerations, wrongdoing, being secretive, self-importance, superficiality and ignoring the law. The second way is based on realism, respect, openness, collective wisdom and avoiding extremism.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi

There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

Willa Cather

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

Berenice Abbott

I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.

Camille Paglia

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Oscar Wilde

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,...Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

C. Wright Mills

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Jonathan Franzen

There is a curious law of art...that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

Northrop Frye

Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.

John Mearsheimer

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out. (Edmund White)

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

Federico Fellini

So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics.

Paul Karl Feyerabend

True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.

Asger Jorn

Realism isn't pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over.

John Ralston Saul

Previous
1 (Current)
2
3
4
Next