Sunday, August 2, 2020 – The Real Deal
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. ~ George Orwell
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. ~ Abraham Lincoln
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. ~ Rene Descartes
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone. ~ Albert Camus
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth. ~ Abraham Maslow
You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. ~ Frank Zappa
It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. ~ Matt Damon
One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead. ~ Oscar Wilde
In truth, politeness is artificial good humor; it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue. ~ Thomas Jefferson
If you’re treated a certain way, you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real, they’re real for you whether they’re real or not. ~ James Baldwin
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. ~ William Blake
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. ~ Victor Hugo
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
Maybe the real secret to America’s greatness is that we hate one another. ~ P. J. O’Rourke
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button. ~ Christopher Lasch
If someone tells you he is going to make a “realistic decision,” you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad. ~ Mary McCarthy
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice. ~ Irving Babbitt
To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
When you’re young, try to be realistic; as you get older, become idealistic. You’ll live longer. ~ Anthony J. D’Angelo
Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist – life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for. ~ N. C. Thomas
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. ~ W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
When people have given up on happiness they call themselves “realists.” ~ Marty Rubin
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out. ~ Dawn Powell
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. ~ William Arthur Ward
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. ~ Viktor E. Frankl
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. ~ Aldous Huxley
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil… Hysterical optimism is a sin against knowledge. ~ Richard M. Weaver
Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real. ~ Federico Fellini
Realism can break a writer’s heart. ~ Salman Rushdie, Shame
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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. ~ Eugène Ionesco
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature. ~ Auguste Rodin
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing. ~ Jean Cocteau
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. ~ Pablo Picasso
Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason. That is its reason for existing. ~ G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. ~ John Fiske
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. ~ John Lennon
People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like “be realistic.” ~ Dylan Moran
She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable. ~ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ~ Philip K. Dick
Just Above Sunset 