Best 45 quotes in «realist quotes» category

I’m a realist,” I said. “Lying and making promises about forever is almost as bad as one day at a time.

I know he’s a realist, he’s okay with being alone, and he helps people when he thinks no one is watching.

It is better to recognise that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light.

It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.

I think now we are simply strangers with some memories.

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.

One—about cigarettes—I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life—and I think that's an important difference.

Perfectionists talk about first love. Realists talk about true love. Optimists talk just about love.

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!

There's something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.

The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him. The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I wonder which one YOU are. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles!

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.

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

When you leave, I feel like I'm alone with your demons.

[ 'American Dream' ] probably will [go] somewhere in Europe. You get 3000 entries [to] Sundance, and how many movies get [screened]? So, I'm a realist. I'm very much realistic in terms of if this movie will be released in the States. Probably not.

You’re not a realist unless you believe in miracles.

An architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist.

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.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

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.

Despite the mythic heights to which he was raised, Azikiwe was nothing if not pragmatic, a realist always conscious of his limits and ever eager to extract all that was possible from that limited horizon.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.

I like to think I'm some savage realist.

I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word "cynic" has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. "George, you're cynical." Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?

I'm not sexist, I'm just a realist.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

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.

I set many of my stories in a gritty "realist" world, but one that is plagued by an overuse of technology, which is akin to the world we find ourselves living in now.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

I tended to be more a romantic than a realist, and chose blind faith over cold logic.

One cannot afford to be a realist.

In love' is for the romantic. 'Love' for the realist.

The visionary is the only realist.

The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay.

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

The great joke is that a realist is an optimistic pessimist. That's very witty. Whether it's truthful or not, that I don't know.

A dreamer is a realist with faith.

Any discussion between idealist and realist would never end.

I am awake and yet I dream. You can be the realist and I can be the dreamer. When our worlds collide one day, I will show you another dimension of life that most dare not to believe in. This world exists just as much as the tangible one. This is where I will always love you.

Empty threats are for dreamers. And I fancy myself a realist.

Ich erinnere mich noch an Ihre Worte: „Die Welt ist ein Schlachthaus und ein Bordell.“ Damals schien mir das übertrieben, aber es ist bittere Wahrheit. Man hält Sie für einen Mystiker, aber in Wirklichkeit sind Sie durch und durch Realist. Wie dem auch sei, alles wird uns aufgezwungen, selbst die Hoffnung.