Best Realist Quotes & Sayings

realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes! — David Nicholls

I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low. — Tom Hiddleston

I want no part of peace with savages who throw acid on and gun down young girls going to school. I would prefer to crush them and kill them wherever they exist. That's not being a warmonger. It's being a realist. — Allen West

Someone told me I'm a cynical fatalist but I prefer the term realist. — Wade Kelly

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. — Andy Warhol

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

In the realist, you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination. — Robert Breault

To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make! — Criss Jami

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

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

An architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. — Cameron Sinclair

I like myself. I have never once hated myself.
My high specs, my half decent looks,
My pessimistic, realist point of view.
I don't hate any of it at all. But, for the first time,
I feel like I could hate myself.

The Yukino Yukinoshita
I've seen all this time was always beautiful, pure,
Never told a lie, and could stand on her own feet even-
With nobody to lean on.
I'm pretty sure I always admired her for that.
I forced my own expectations and ideals on her,
Let myself think I understood her, and let myself be dissapointed.

I cautioned myself against this time and time again,
But I still haven't gotten over it.
Even Yukino Yukinoshita tells lies.
I couldn't even accept such an obvious fact,
And for that...I...hate myself
- Hachiman Hikigaya — Wataru Watari

I guess we need to keep adjusting our dreams to fit reality, because life is not going to cooperate. Maybe this makes me a defeatist, but I'd prefer to think of myself as realist. — Cassia Leo

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? — Cormac McCarthy

I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn't win the race. I am a realist. — Jean Alesi

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

My mother is a realist, and she's had biological and adoptive children, and she said it's no different: No matter what, they're putting a stranger into your arms. You don't know them yet. — Katherine Heigl

And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes. — V.C. Andrews

I like to think I'm some savage realist. — Nick Frost

To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency ... The Realist position is probably the one which most mathematicians would prefer to take. It is not until he becomes aware of some of the difficulties in set theory that he would even begin to question it. If these difficulties particularly upset him, he will rush to the shelter of Formalism, while his normal position will be somewhere between the two, trying to enjoy the best of two worlds. — Paul Cohen

Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula's spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful. — Kate Atkinson

I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society. — Wole Soyinka

But as Austen delineates so clearly, you can't stop people from making assumptions if they're so inclined. You can only do your best to show your character through your actions and hope that other people will be capable of forming sound opinions. And if you're a realist like Austen, you'll also be wise enough to realize how many people aren't up to it. — Amy Smith

The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true." — James Branch Cabell

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

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. 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 fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You're not a realist unless you believe in miracles. — Anwar Sadat

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.

America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists. — Dortha Jackson

Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme. — Esther Perel

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

I have a lot of courage. I'm a realist. — Elisabeth Rohm

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

Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds. — Anna Funder

We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. — Noam Chomsky

I'm a realist, okay? I have been for a long time. I need to be, and you liking me-wanting to take me out on a date and do-"
"Really fun and interesting things to you." he supplied.
I flushed. "Yeah, that."
"Naughty things that are going to make you feel so good," Jax continued, and his words and the way he spoke them turned me on like I'd never been before. "That's what I want to do to you. — J. Lynn

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

I'm more of a realist when it comes to life, and I'd much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life. — Kevin Hart

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

Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes. — Studs Terkel

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization. — Leni Zumas

Half of your mastery of power comes from what you do NOT do, what you do not ALLOW yourself to get dragged into. — Robert Greene

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

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist). — Max Stirner