Quotes on Realism

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

It is foolish to view realism and idealism as incompatible or to consider our power and wealth as encumbered by the demands of justice, morality, and conscience.

I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

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

REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism.

Mix idealism with realism and add hard work. This will often bring much more than you could ever hope for.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

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

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

I learned that realism can come in all shapes and sizes. The world is big enough for different values to coexist.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.