Realistically Quotes & Sayings

When I was little I had this notion of being a marine biologist. I grew up by the ocean so I was always in the water but realistically, I don't think I would make the best marine biologist. — Victoria Justice

If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them. — Albert Ellis

The class warfare was in the script as well. It establishes what the world is like and what would happen if we really had two zones that were left and everybody had to survive using these two areas. What would our society to do with that set up? I wanted the state of world, in my mind, how it would actually realistically unfold. I drew that from what was in the script. — Len Wiseman

Every year you suit up, you play for a championship. Some years, some teams ... it was very few times I think I played on that realistically had a chance. — Grant Hill

There are solutions that are proper, but they require the painstaking and difficult work of building alliances and also being prepared to analyze the problem realistically. And exactly the same thing is going on my side of the Atlantic as is going on your side of the Atlantic. — Tony Blair

Realistically I know I'm an entertainer. When you're exciting, you're remembered. — Johny Hendricks

In 1972, the psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as, "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." Groupthink most commonly affects homogenous, close-knit communities that are overly insulated from internal and external criticism, and that perceive themselves as different from or under attack by outsiders. Its symptoms include censorship of dissent, rejection or rationalization of criticisms, the conviction of moral superiority, and the demonization of those who hold opposing beliefs. It typically leads to the incomplete or inaccurate assessment of information, the failure to seriously consider other possible options, a tendency to make rash decisions, and the refusal to reevaluate or alter those decisions once they've been made. — Kathryn Schulz

The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you still are trying as realistically as you can to depict these characters. — Don Cheadle

Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after - that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me. — Robert A. Johnson

If you come off the start in a final in fourth or fifth, realistically, the best you can probably do is a podium - squeeze second, third. The chance of you winning at any major race if you get cut off down the hill is pretty remote. — Tory Nyhaug

Our common humanity, viewed realistically, can be as much a source of despair as hope. — Lawrence H. Keeley

I cannot tell you how many times guides have said to me, "Please tell them to stop praying to me. I can't make things happen. I can't protect them from going through challenging experiences. These are experiences their soul has chosen to go through. I'm here to keep them on their path, but I don't want them to give me all this attention or power or focus." Realistically, the guides I work with are really encouraging people to find their inner voice. — Echo Bodine

But realistically, I could not kill my brother-in-law. — Lola Dodge

As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Realistically, there is a danger, of course, when you're going into someone's living room as the same guy every week. But I don't fear it because, I mean, there's really nothing I can do about it. I can try to combat it through the work, and maybe make sure I don't do Sheldon 2.0 in any other projects. But it's just really hard for me to find any negative side effects from this experience. — Jim Parsons

Lydia gave him a sunrise so realistically portrayed that Vincent could feel its warmth upon his face and smell the wildflowers blooming in the field. Her sun did not burn him. The — Brooklyn Ann

I've never stopped loving the game since day one. If it were a job to me it would be very hard for me to get up in the morning. And why leave something that you can never come back to? Realistically, whether you accept it or not, you only get one wave in this journey. Run at it as hard as you can. — Ray Lewis

Realistically speaking, I don't know how many more years I will want to be acting or will be invited to be. — Jennifer Aniston

Realistically, we could aim for the top three in the constructors championship. Realistically, we could look at winning more races. Three race wins would be very satisfying. — Damon Hill

Nesse's research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it's stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism - and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It's to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can't realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy ... — Jane McGonigal

I've been watching American baseball on television for a long time, but it was only in recent years that, realistically, I've been thinking about playing here. — Hideki Matsui

The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically. — Eugene B. Sledge

When I worked on my game, that's what I thought about. When it happened, I set another goal, a reasonable, manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough. I guess I approached it with the end in mind. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I focused on getting there. — Michael Jordan

Paris is particularly beautiful in the rain. It was just a nice experience for me, a pleasant experience, and I was able to present it to the world through my eyes, very subjectively - not realistically, but subjectively. — Woody Allen

Leaders can choose to grow and change, but generally the most powerful predictor of future performance is past behavior. Evaluate them realistically. — Lee Ellis

Attention equals importance equals value equals ego. Or, more realistically, Attention equals success. — Cris Mazza

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. — Asti Hustvedt

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town. — Anne Lamott

Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible. — Haruki Murakami

As you heal, you see yourself more realistically. You accept that you are a person with strengths and weaknesses. You make the changes you can in your life and let go of the things that aren't in your power to change. You learn that every part of you is valuable. And you realize that all of your thoughts and feelings are important, even when they're painful or difficult. — Ellen Bass

Realistically, I think we are not prepared to go home until we do get more teachers and lower class sizes. — John Podesta

Examine your experience of the incarnation so far and realistically add up the moments of happiness and unhappiness and you tell me, oh somewhat vaguely nobly born, you tell me, what has it been like for you? — Frederick Lenz

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. — Noam Chomsky

I set another goal ... a reasonable, manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough. I approached everything step by step. — Michael Jordan

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent
war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. — Susan Sontag

You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. — Nora Ephron

You know what I loved about 'Sideways'? Well, the wine, of course. But it was one of the few movies in which being a writer was realistically depicted. I loved how the Paul Giamatti character tries so ineptly to talk about his book. — Kristan Higgins

Congress has never since effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on war. It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush. It was true of Bill Clinton. And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them. By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man's decision to make. It wasn't supposed to be like this. — Rachel Maddow

There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that person. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the person. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death. — Edwin S. Shneidman

Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

There is...no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living...They were to be the spearhead of good against evil. — J.B. Phillips

It makes no sense to compare yourself with others because there will always be better & worse people than you out there. Each person has his own path to make. You are where you are now. Could you reach for the stars & have everything you want? realistically no. You may not win Olympic Gold in London 2012 , or be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company etc but you most definitely have the capacity to make YOUR life as the Masterpiece it could really be. The choice is yours ... — Pablo

As an actor, you don't want to know the beginning and end to your character's arc. It makes it more fun. You're not playing the end. You're playing it realistically. You don't know where this character is going to go and what's going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch. — Jordan Gavaris

Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem to be able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck."
"How to do you account for that?" said Jimmy
"Imagination," said Crake. "Men can imagine their own deaths ... human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else ... and live on forever. — Margaret Atwood

God created us with an overwhelming desire to soar. Our desire to develop and use every ounce of potential He's placed in us is not egotistical. He designed us to be tremendously productive and "to mount up with wings like eagles," realistically dreaming of what He can do with our potential. — Carol Kent

Some people think I'm paranoid, but I like to say I'm realistically prepared for when the shit hits the fan — Jennifer L. Armentrout

She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn't fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn't slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. — Barbara Kingsolver

It was tough coming to the realization that I wasn't interested in anything, though realizing it didn't mean I could then immediately find something to engage my interest. I tried to think of something. Maybe I could study a foreign language or study abroad in Rome or somewhere? Or, more realistically, grab some guy I knew and have a destination wedding abroad. But everything I could think of was based on how envious it would make people, not on any genuine interest I might have. — Shuichi Yoshida

Patience is the specific antidote to anger and hatred. It is an attitude of accepting both the harm caused by others and the pains and discomforts found in life instead of angrily retaliating against them. Only in the calm afforded by patient acceptance is one able to clearly discern the nature of the situation and proceed to deal with it realistically. Once the mind becomes distorted and disturbed with anger, any possibility of objectivity is lost. One consequently embarks upon a course of action grounded in misconception that inevitably leads to a heightening of the initial conflict rather than its resolution. — Stephen Batchelor

Don't you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there's a huge possibility you'll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn't that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don't you find that scary? — Haruki Murakami

I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea." — Eva Mendes

So which is it to be, Benedict or Wilberforce? I think it needs to be both. Realistically, in the short term, most of our energy will need to be expended on preserving confidence in our own communities. As we saw in the last chapter, there is much work to be done in transforming our own communities in ways that will buttress and nurture what we believe. But while sustaining and nurturing these beliefs must be our short-term priority, our hearts, together with our heads, must remain orientated to the welfare of the city where we have been exiled. Clearly, — Glynn Harrison

Political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just Society of Peoples. — John Rawls

I realistically eat every hour and 15 minutes. I watch the clock to see when I eat again. I'm almost upset that I'm not eating now. — Michael Todd

Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen. — Jodi Picoult

I like to make movies about how people actually live, realistically. — Frank Whaley

One thing I think is that comics are really good at expressing emotion. I think there's a way that comics characters can be drawn not-realistically, but the emotional reality is still very sincere. So you can have these exaggerations that express inner emotion through physical appearance. — Jeffrey Brown

Robin Hood is often seen as the hands-on-hips, archetypal, tally-ho hero. But, realistically, the one calling the shots wouldn't be at the front shouting about it. He'd be the one you don't expect. — Jonas Armstrong

Making a fantastical world real is a bit of a challenge, for sure. When you're on set and you have a green screen you're working with where you'll pretend there's a giant lizard chasing you when there's nothing there. Being shown the images of what the creatures were going to look like and then having to react to them realistically without feeling like you're a crazy person. You kind of have to go for it. In order to sell it to the audience, you can't really hold back. — Josh Hutcherson

I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn't actually care for. — Tama Janowitz

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong. — Edna Ferber

I'm a self trained, autodidactic artist, so all I was ever trying to do was to draw as realistically as possible - but that's what comes out, because I don't really know how to draw! I think when I draw characters, I'm able to reduce them down to little marks that capture the most distinct elements of them. — Box Brown

Learn to know yourself ... to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings. — Nelson Mandela

One of the most revolutionary concepts to grow out of our clinical experience is the growing recognition that innermost core of man's nature - the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his 'animal nature' - is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic ... He is realistically able to control himself, and he is incorrigibly socialized in his desires. There is no beast in man, there is only man in man. — Carl Rogers

It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable ... There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist. — E. Haldeman-Julius

And when you love someone you don't always see them realistically. — P.C. Cast

Do that, and the best you can hope for is that people will ignore you. More realistically, you'd be skinned alive, or possibly sentenced to ten year hard labor writing microcode for waffle irons and toaster ovens. — Scott Meyers

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter. — Christopher Fowler

The experience of [the African] bishops is that evangelization itself should be foremost, that the God of Jesus Christ must be known, believed in and loved, and that hearts must be converted if progress is to be made on social issues and reconciliation is to begin, and if - for example - AIDS is to be combated by realistically facing its deeper causes and the sick are to be given the loving care they need. Social issues and the Gospel are inseparable. — Pope Benedict XVI

Look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They're not only alive, readers are excited about them. — Gayle Lynds

Have to love the preemptive guilt trip! I will be visiting home for Mother's Day. Hoping for minimal "baby cannon" talk, but realistically that's going to be a big part of the day. — Kate Siegel

Realistically, the last advice you want to hear when you are in a terrible mood is"Think of something happy." If you're experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover.
For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep,and time are the smart buttons to push. Once you get back to your baseline level of happiness, you'll be in a better position to get the benefits of daydreaming. — Scott Adams

A questionnaire! Such an obvious solution. A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganised, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates. — Graeme Simsion

But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people's lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me. — Daniel Mason

Realistically, it's a risk, I suppose, but in this day and age, you almost have to choose between freedom, which can devolve into chaos, and security, which can become a pair of shackles. — Ann Aguirre

Aren't you afraid, though?" Ayumi asked Aomame.
"Afraid of what?"
"Don't you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there's a huge possibility you'll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn't that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don't you find that scary?
Aomame stared at the red wine in her glass. "Maybe I do," she said. "But at least I have someone I love. — Haruki Murakami

Well sure, who doesn't need a boyfriend? but realistically, those exotic creatures are hard to come by. At least a quality one. — Rachel Cohn

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland. — Sarah Hall

Evelyn: ...Don't take my negativity for lack of self-confidence. I'm just a realist.
Maddie: Realistically dumb. — Rachel Hera

The keys to patience are acceptance and faith. Accept things as they are, and look realistically at the world around you. Have faith in yourself and in the direction you have chosen. — Ralph Marston

Acting for me was an escape and it wasn't until Smoke Signals that made me realize that acting is a personal development and challenge to grow. Smoke Signals really mirrored the way I grew up and how I felt, and that movie was the first time I'd dealt with my parents' death and how I felt that loss and sadness and anger. After that movie I said, "Y'know what, I have to realistically wear my emotions now when I do a job. That's gotta be as real as it gets. It's not just dialogue anymore." — Adam Beach

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed. — Gore Vidal

I think that's important to have in something like a national television show. It's important to portray a woman realistically, and not just as a bridezilla. — Cristin Milioti

Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort. — Joe Dante

I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy. — Steven Wright

I think when we read we have to hear with no ears and realistically see with no eyes and doing that does something good to us. — U.L. Harper

The hypothesis of value realism is superfluous - a wheel that spins without being attached to anything. From a Darwinian perspective our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless. And if that is true for our most basic responses, it is also true for the entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up from them by practical reflection and cultural development - just as scientific realism would be undermined if we abandoned a realistic interpretation of the perceptual experiences on which science is based. Even a system based on the maintenance of coherence or consistency among one's responses does not need the idea of mind-independent truth about value (as opposed to logic), — Thomas Nagel

Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and Josephine is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a tabula rasa, a blank slate - hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated sheep that had more of a right to live. — Tim Powers

Of course the Catholic ethic was an ethic of intentions. But the concrete intentio of the single act determined its value. And the single good or bad action was credited to the doer determining his temporal and eternal fate. Quite realistically the Church recognized that man was not an absolutely clearly defined unity to be judged one way or the other, but that his moral life was normally subject to conflicting motives and his action contradictory. — Max Weber

Hitting. That's what I enjoy most. Realistically, it's probably the hardest thing to do in all of sport. Think about it. You've got a round ball, a round bat, and the object is to hit it square. — Pete Rose

I'm an outside chance at Roland Garros but my focus is really on Wimbledon where it is realistically between me and Roger Federer to win. — Lleyton Hewitt

Those who hope to avoid all failure and misfortune are trying to live in a fairyland; wise people realistically accept failures as a part of life and build philosophies to meet them and make the best of them. — Wilferd Peterson

Where rejection is present with neurotic anxiety, we found a certain constellation always present: The rejection was never accepted as an objective fact, but was held in juxtaposition with idealized expectations about the parent. The young woman was unable to appraise the parent realistically, but always confused the reality situation with expectations of what the parent should have been or might yet become. — Rollo May

When embarking on a social project that concerns other people, how do you decide what your actions will be? Do you choose what is most rewarding to you personally? Do you try to find out what the objects of your help actually want? How do you accomplish that? What do you do if you find out that you cannot realistically provide what they desire? Or if you don't like it? In other words, who defines social projects? — Laura Maria Agustin

I wish writing were really like the way Andy staged it here: Me in a mania at a desk while a group of people stand around cheering in awe. More realistically, it's me pooping around on Twitter until I get an idea. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity. — Roman Polanski

I didn't take the decision [to get married] lightly. I ventured into it realistically. But life takes you places you wouldn't have expected. I'm really content with what was in the cards for me. — Mandy Moore

Of all the love stories ever published, I have - realistically - read very few. — Richard Flanagan

It is extremely urgent to try and adapt our thoughts realistically to a world which has no fixed general direction either upward or downward, but is likely to vary largely according to what we do. — Mary Midgley

A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically. — R. Buckminster Fuller