Quotes about Realism
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Quotes about Realism

Quotes about Reality


Quotes about Realism

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Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself. (Berenice Abbott)

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute. (Marina Abramovic)

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence. (Ansel Adams)

-Emptiness Dancing...
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind; they come and go and aren't even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now? (Adyashanti)

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye. (Shana Alexander)

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality. (Steve Allen)

Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded. (Laurie Anderson)

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination. (Anonymous)

Distinctions drawn by the mind are not necessarily equivalent to distinctions in reality. (St. Thomas Aquinas)

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. (Louis Aragon)

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance, and this, and not the external manner and detail, is true reality. (Aristotle)

The more I paint out the details, the more real the paintings look to me. (Clyde Aspevig)

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist. (Margaret Atwood)

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. (J. G. Ballard)

Art is not truth. Truth conforms to reality. Art invents reality. (Darby Bannard)

Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life. (Darby Bannard)

We live in an age in which individual experience is manifested and interpreted by two diametrically opposed catalysts: reality generated by personal beliefs and media-generated reality. (Che Baraka)

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. (Roland Barthes)

The reality is the picture; it is most certainly not in the picture. (Georg Baselitz)

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live. (Mary Catherine Bateson)

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. (Charles Baudelaire)

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. (Jean Baudrillard)

-Simulations, 1983...
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real. (Jean Baudrillard)

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times... She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it. (Alison Bechdel)

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence. (Max Beckmann)

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. (Clive Bell)

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. (Arthur Christopher Benson)

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. (Henri Bergson)

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary. (Henri Bergson)

The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception. He must ignore or override the very mechanisms in his mind that create objects out of images... The artist, like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies. (Colin Blakemore)

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. (Niels Bohr)

Reality is permeated, indeed flooded, with divine creativity, nourishment, and care. (Marcus J. Borg)

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. (Alain de Botton)

-The Mists of Avalon...
Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became. (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface. (Constantin Brancusi)

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. (Georges Braque)

-The White-Haired Revolver, 1932
The imaginary is what tends to become real. (Andre Breton)

The true is not material reality only. (Jules Breton)

Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality. (Les Brown)

Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul. We love suggestion and not hard facts. (John F. Carlson)

-on American Cultural players after September 11, 2001...
They have proclaimed that this is a time when art should not upset, not remind and, by implication, should say little and mean even less. Escape from terrible reality is a healthier choice in dark times, some believe. (Tim Carlson)

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison for those who can't get out. (Joyce Cary)

The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. (Carlos Castaneda)

It does not matter that Dickens' world is not life-like; it is alive. (Lord David Cecil)

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world. (Marc Chagall)

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. (Tom Clancy)

You can put wings on a pig, but that doesn't make it an eagle. (Bill Clinton)

Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives. (Robert Collier)

Reality is one part of art; feeling completes it... (Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot)

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it. (Gustave Courbet)

You can easily become a slave to reality... My best stuff comes not from taking reality by surprise, but from being taken by surprise by reality. (Warren Criswell)

We can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites. (Anthony J. D'Angelo)

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality... (Salvador Dali)

-on Norman Rockwell...
The Rockwell [magazine] cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it. (Arthur C. Danto)

Reality in art is composed of shapes and colors. (Stuart Davis)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)

Reality has to be digested, it has to be transmuted by paint. It has to be given a twist of some kind. (Richard Diebenkorn)

The truth of art consists in its power to break the monopoly that those in power exercise by defining what is real. (Denis Donoghue)

Our intention creates our reality. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. (Albert Einstein)

All art forms employ some means through which images become real. (Elliot W. Eisner)

What a long time I have been running after unrealities! (Jitoku Eki)

Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality. (T. S. Eliot)

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. (Ralph Ellison)

I like saying what's what. (Walker Evans)

The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.' (Richard Feynman)

Make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality – not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration. (Ernst Fischer)

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it. (Gustave Flaubert)

Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean - reality? ...There is nothing less natural than Michelangelo; there is nothing more powerful! (Gustave Flaubert)

I'm trying to do something that is real. What I mean is this; my sense of being in the world starts with a physical relationship with my surroundings, their weight, texture, density, transparency, and so forth... (Andrew Forge)

-on Lawren Harris...
The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. (Northrop Frye)

The experience of reality is raw and immediate, unmitigated by words. Art is a language that can transcend words... (Ron Gang)

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. (Alberto Giacometti)

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair. (Alberto Giacometti)

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself. (Alberto Giacometti)

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted... (S. Giedion)

-Stumbling on Happiness...
'Reality' is a movie generated by our brains. Because we don't realize this, we are far too confident that the stuff appearing in the movie is actually 'out there' in the world when, in fact, it's not. (Daniel T. Gilbert)

Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality. (Langdon Gilkey)

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories gives it form. (Jean-Luc Godard)

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists? (Vincent van Gogh)

Reality is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. (Eva Green)

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist. (Julien Green)

Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it. (Clement Greenberg)

The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos. (Ernst Haas)

We artists are mythmakers, and we participate with everybody else in the social construction of reality. (Helen Mayer Harrison)

There is no unique picture of reality. (Stephen Hawking)

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Reality is obtained not by imitation, but by producing the sense of nature. (Robert Henri)

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. (Hermann Hesse)

The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality. (Hans Hofmann)

Reality is overrated. (Mark Hofreiter)

We live in a description of reality. (Jean Houston)

Everything is reality. (Robert Irwin)

What is not grasped has all the chances to become real. (Edmond Jabes)

I tend to like things that already exist. (Jasper Johns)

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality. (Frida Kahlo)

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. (Wassily Kandinsky)

I am a lover of what is. When I argue with reality, I lose - but only 100% of the time. (Byron Katie)

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. (Nikos Kazantzakis)

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. (Garrison Keillor)

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible. (Paul Klee)

That Reality is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thoughts, in the fullness of love. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality. (Suzanne Langer)

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system. (Jaron Lanier)

Outside man's experience... reality is unbounded, undifferentiated, timeless. Man believes it but does not know it... Within his experience, the reality assumes temporality and limits. As it impinges upon his consciousness he imposes temporary shapes upon it. (Dorothy Lee)

You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth. (Annie Leibovitz)

The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds. (Desmond MacCarthy)

There is no greater mystery than this: being Reality ourselves, we seek to gain Reality. (Ramana Maharshi)

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? (Yann Martel)

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. (Marshall McLuhan)

You never saw any husband writing an alimony check in Norman Rockwell's America. (George Mendoza)

We build our own reality. Even colors are products of our mind. Vincent van Gogh told his brother he could see twenty-seven different shades of gray. (Michael Michalko)

Reality manifests itself as constant and objective – independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality. (Piet Mondrian)

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. (Piet Mondrian)

Reality can destroy the dream – why shouldn't the dream destroy reality? (George Moore)

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that... the objective world... never really exists as we see and understand it... has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. (Giorgio Morandi)

We trade in our reality for a role... give up the ability to feel and, in exchange, put on a mask. (Jim Morrison)

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true – to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth – the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality. (Robert Motherwell)

Legend has it that a gentleman once approached Picasso on the street and criticized his paintings as distorting reality. Seeming to change the subject, the artist asked the gentleman if he had a girlfriend. He did, and produced a small picture of her from his wallet. 'She's beautiful,' replied Picasso, 'but she's so tiny.' (Keshavan Nair)

Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality. (Earl Nightingale)

The process of reading things as simulations but knowing at the same time that they are real is quite central to my work. (Julian Opie)

If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. (Osho)

The painter tries to catch the magic of the lights and shadows and passing graces of the human face he paints, but he never wholly succeeds in overtaking the reality. (John Edgar Park)

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality. (Martin Parr)

We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers. (Joseph Chilton Pearce)

Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness. (Pablo Picasso)

Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. (Robert M. Pirsig)

Avoid the hypnotism of reality. (Alex Powers)

There is just no end to reality. You can keep going closer into it, but you never ever come out the other end. (Joseph Raffael)

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature. (Ayn Rand)

You can ignore reality but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. (Ayn Rand)

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world. (Robert Rauschenberg)

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. (Odilon Redon)

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot rise from a comparison but from the rapprochement of two or more less distant realities. The more the two realities which are brought together are remote and accurate, the stronger the image will be – the more it will have emotive power and poetic reality. (Pierre Reverdy)

-interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987...
My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. (Gerhard Richter)

Fancy rules over two thirds of the universe, the past, and future, while reality is confined to the present. (Jean Paul Richter)

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality. (Tim Robbins)

Our words, our thoughts, and our feelings all contribute to the creation of our reality. Our word is a two-edged sword, it can create or it can destroy. (Don Miguel Ruiz)

You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open. (Rumi)

-The Satanic Verses...
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it. (Salman Rushdie)

There are no such things as flowers; there are only gladdened leaves. (John Ruskin)

Art must take reality by surprise. (Francoise Sagan)

Reality is when you pay the rent. Get caught in traffic or your car breaks down. Really it's an AM/FM sort of thing. You've got reality and then there's the miraculous and the transcendent. And once you start, time stops. (Carolyn See)

The abstraction of reality requires a clear understanding of that reality in order to successfully structure its abstraction. (Ian Semple)

Forget the cringing selves you sometimes are and remember, instead, the magic essence of your own being that sings even now through your fingertips. That is the reality which you are seeking. Experience it fully. (Seth)

A painting is a proposal about what is real. (Harriet Shorr)

Is there in every work of art something which shows reality as one and also something which shows reality as many and diverse? - must every work of art have a simultaneous presence of oneness and manyness, unity and variety? (Eli Siegel)

Reality is all that which can affect one. (Eli Siegel)

We don't live in a world of reality; we live in a world of perceptions. (Gerald J. Simmons)

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more. (Gertrude Stein)

What is necessary when we want to face reality? Stillness. (David Steindl-Rast)

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into. (Wallace Stevens)

-The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination...
Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor. (Wallace Stevens)

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. (Alfred Stieglitz)

Reproducing the existing forms of the world is reproduction rather than creation – and thus not art. (Wladyslaw Strzeminski)

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life. (Theodore Sturgeon)

-Letters from Emptiness...
All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake. (Shunryu Suzuki)

Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation. (Rabindranath Tagore)

- Antoni Tapies by Serafin Garcia Ibanez in the UNESCO Courier, June 1994...
When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life. (Antoni Tapies)

- Antoni Tapies by Serafin Garcia Ibanez in the UNESCO Courier, June 1994...
To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere; it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings - a reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once. (Antoni Tapies)

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. (Paul Theroux)

Seize the moments of happiness; love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world; all else is folly. (Leo Tolstoy)

What's reality anyway? Nothing but a collective hunch. (Lily Tomlin)

The meditator develops new depths of insight through direct communication with the reality of the phenomenal world... He or she is able to see not only the absence of complexity, the absence of duality, but the stoneness of stone and the waterness of water. One sees things precisely as they are, not merely in the physical sense, but with awareness of their spiritual significance. (Chogyam Trungpa)

When the mind is possessed of reality, it feels tranquil and joyous even without music or song, and it produces a pure fragrance even without incense or tea. (Hung Tzu-Cheng)

There is no reality in the absence of observation. (Author unknown)

What is, is. What isn't, isn't. We become so obsessed with what isn't that we miss what is. (Author unknown)

-depicting the war efforts...
I tell you Arthur, your wildest nightmares pale before reality. How the devil one can paint anything to express such is beyond me. (Fred Varley)

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable. (Jimmy Wales)

The history of drawing is a history of 'realities'. Every age has its own conceptions, held to be true at that time, believed to be true for all times. (Howard Warshaw)

Fused into the paint is my delight, as qualities and relations emerge from the process. Thus, a new reality is re-created which began with observation, but goes beyond what is to what ought to be. (Frank Webb)

We ourselves are not an illusory part of Reality; rather are we Reality itself illusorily conceived. (Wei Wu Wei)

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion... (Eudora Welty)

I accept reality and dare not question it. (Walt Whitman)

A play visibly represents pure existing. (Thornton Wilder)

Reality: What a concept! (Robin Williams)

All speech, action, and behaviour are fluctuations of consciousness. All life emerges from, and is sustained in, consciousness. The whole universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)

Artists erase reality to a greater or lesser extent, and substitute their own reality - created by their brains, instead. (Semir Zeki)