Quotes & Sayings About Realists

I have met otherwise educated folks who haven't heard that cooked bones can kill a dog, so perhaps the vets are just being realists. — Carina MacDonald

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov. — John Vaillant

I am certainly open to the idea that this might be used to explain other philosophical categories besides knowledge. I have some real sympathy with the work of those moral realists who have tried to give naturalistic accounts of human flourishing, and who offer accounts of right action in such terms. (I suppose this is more evidence that I really do have deep affinities with Aristotle!) — Hilary Kornblith

Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties. — Erich Fromm

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. — Hermann Hesse

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort. — William Gibson

Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers. — Paul Wellstone

But what reality was ever made by realists? They — Richard Flanagan

The Parisian is of all men the most sophisticated. Paris is a city of realists, unaffected by sentimentality; a city of industry and thrift; a city of irony, but rarely of laughter, of wit but never or humour, of superficial intolerance and yet of people who regard the rest of the world with more or less amiable contempt. — Sidney Dark

Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists. By its exactitudes of measurements it invites the attention of perfectionists. — Heywood Hale Broun

It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists. — John Steinbeck

The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it. — Edith Hamilton

Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What's more, he's taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn't easy to believe in something after you know what it's really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code. — Linda Goodman

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient. — Michael Lind

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men. — G.K. Chesterton

The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive. — C. Wright Mills

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art. — Roland Barthes

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

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it ... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane ... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain. — Ray Bradbury

It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life. — William McFee

Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists. — Agatha Christie

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. — Roberto Bolano

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. — Bertrand Russell

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth! — Max Stirner

Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists; Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists; Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists. — Sydney J. Harris

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

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

When people have given up on happiness they call themselves realists. — Marty Rubin

Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all. — Stephen King

But if one decides to start with Descartes and finish with Aristotle, and to employ an idealist method while shamelessly making use of a reality one has no right to, one brings confusion into the heart of philosophy and makes its cultivation impossible. To make it possible again is the reason why realists are realists and call themselves such. They too follow a method, but they do not lay down beforehand what that method is to be, as though it were a necessary pre-condition for their philosophy. Instead, they find their method in their philosophy. So they never have to ask themselves whether it is legitimate to transform their method into a metaphysics, because their method is that metaphysics, which is fully aware of its proceedings, of its initial positions, and of their implications. — Etienne Gilson

Any power that doesn't give you benefit is not a power. — M.F. Moonzajer

Bad things happen to realists. — David Mitchell

I was staying at the Konchucos Tambo lodge, next to the Huascaran national park, near Chavin. Sitting here on its veranda, I was beginning to see where all those Latin American magical realists get their inspiration from: they don't need to make anything up; they just write down what's around them. — Mark Barrowcliffe

It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists? — Richard Flanagan

Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us. — Robert D. Kaplan

The framers were realists; they recognized that the best constitution in the world could be distorted and destroyed by men determined to do so. — John Eidsmoe

A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads. — Louis L'Amour

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough. — Robert D. Kaplan

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me ... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it ... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists. — Stephen Hawking

Opportunists are promoted, realists are co-opted, idealists are frightened and radicals are shot. — Heather Marsh

Machiavelli wrote, "The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow." This is a better definition of realism than the realists have given us. — George Friedman

I'm a realist. And realists don't fool themselves. — Adam Dunn

Realists do not fear the results of their study. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A realist is a slave to reality. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

First of all understand that I get it. That there are millions and millions of women who are steely eyed realists. And millions and millions of men who are anything but. However. For lack of a better term I would say that the feminine values are the values of america :
Sensitivity is more important than Truth. Feeling are more important than Facts. Commitment is more important than Individuality. Children are more important than People. Safety is more important than Fun.
I always hear women say 'Y'know married men live longer'.
Yes. And an indoor cat also, lives longer. — Bill Maher

Sometimes I think you realists are the most sentimental people in the world. — John Steinbeck

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept. — Satish Kumar

Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don't smile much.
Nominalists have more fun. They are known as Aristotle or Decimus-et-Ultimus Barziza, or as Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montague, or perhaps by one name in childhood and several others in the course of life.
A firm Realist misses out on one of the most satisfying of all human activities
the assumption of secret identities. A man who has lived and never been someone else has never lived.
It is true that occasionally there can be embarrassment in secret identities, but only a Realist will take the whole thing seriously enough to hit you. So have your fun, and avoid Realists. — Alexei Panshin

We're hard-core realists - we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway. — Peter Watts

The idea of universal brotherhood is innate in the catholic nature of Chinese thought; it was the dominant concept of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, whom events have proved time and again to be not a visionary but one of the world's greatest realists. — Chiang Kai-shek

Realists know where they're going. Dreamers have already been there. — Robert Orben

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes ... They are the supreme realists of the race. — H.L. Mencken

Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of transportation to reach dimensions above or beyond the traps set by the so-called realists. It is a way to learn levitation and travel in liberated continents, to travel by moonlight as well as sunlight. — Anais Nin

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. — Donald Harington

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds ... — Sylvia Plath

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one's security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory. — Robert Gilpin

I believe that history is not made by cynics; it is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. Let us be these people. — Tzipi Livni

Their [realists'] concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the United Nations have not been conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would become extremely nervous of any move to give the UN the overwhelming power needed to do this. — Kenneth Minogue

Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists. — Gregory Benford

Perfectionists talk about first love. Realists talk about true love. Optimists talk just about love. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

There are dreamers and there are realists in this world. You'd think the dreamers would find the dreamers, and the realists would find the realists, but more often than not, the opposite is true.
See, the dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun.
And the realists?
Well, without the dreamers, they might not ever get off the ground. — Modern Family

Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know. — Martin Scorsese

The history of this nation up through the Civil War shows how difficult the establishment of a federal authority can be when there are profound differences in the values of the societies it attempts to integrate."3 Oppenheimer thus became the first of many postwar realists to disparage Einstein for being allegedly too idealistic. — Walter Isaacson

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is. — Aretha Franklin

Scientific realists claim that the aim of science is to give us theories — Matthew Chrisman

There are only two kinds of people in this world. The realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there. — Robert Orben

Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation ... The most essential attribute of human nature is its mutability and freedom from instinct ... it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base. — M. Scott Peck

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars. — Paul Virilio

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists. — Hillary Clinton

What a trajedy to be a martyr for love, yet we worship the characters anyways because they remind us of how we struggled. — Shannon L. Alder

People can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer. — Haruki Murakami

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling. — Max Stirner

Since all these novelists [the realists] happened to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism. — Dorothy M. Richardson

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

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble ... truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Now people can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. — Haruki Murakami

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

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

Almost everyone is overconfident
except the people who are depressed, and they tend to be realists. — Joseph T. Hallinan

Challenges exist to be overcome! Let us be realists, but without losing our joy, our boldness and our hope-filled commitment. Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of missionary vigour! — Pope Francis

Keep them hungry and they will certainly become realists. — M.F. Moonzajer

Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. — Robert D. Kaplan

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

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red. — Edvard Munch

Without so much as turning a hair I freely admit that I am one of America's greatest realists. — Thorne Smith

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists. — Doris Lessing

Cynical' is a term invented by optimists to describe realists. — Anonymous

It's time that we acknowledge the wisdom women have acquired by managing the chaos of daily life. Women are realists, the glue that holds society together. They bring a reverence to life that's instinctual, not just intellectual. — Teresa Heinz

Creative people are optimistic realists to discover versatility. — Pearl Zhu

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it's clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less. — Ben Marcus

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus. — Kurt Sutter

Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march. — George W. Bush

It isn't a circle
it is simply a long line
as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end
we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes
who dream, who will not give up
are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"! — Lorraine Hansberry

Men are not realists - only women are. — Mae West

But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand. — Kathleen Norris

Realists are, as a rule, only men in the rut of routine who are incapable of transcending a narrow circle of antiquated notions. — Theodor Herzl

The Realists
HOPE that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons? — W.B.Yeats

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