These realism quotes will inspire you. Realism is a term used to describe the way in which people view reality.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging realism quotes, realism sayings, and realism proverbs.
Best Realism Quotes
- “True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.” ~ Jean Cocteau
- “Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.” ~ Federico Fellini
- “It is far easier to debate about realistic painting than to paint one.” ~ Igor Babailov
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“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” ~ William Arthur Ward
- “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
- “You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “Realism is a corruption of reality.” ~ Wallace Stevens
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“Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.” ~ Paul Lynde
- “Realism has to be such high quality, you can’t fake it. It’s all hanging out there like the laundry.” ~ Nelson Shanks
- “Even a part of an object has value. A whole new realism resides in the way one envisages an object or one of its parts.” ~ Fernand Leger
- “Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.” ~ Gustave Courbet
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“Representational painters: place your works in a larger context. Give your work not only breadth but breath. Do not ‘copy’ what you see outwardly but give it ‘spirit.” ~ Joshua L. Goldberg
- “I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It’s kind of a fine line.” ~ Daniel Clowes
- “It is the special privilege of the fine artist to reveal immediate data with a clarity, intensity and purity that promotes them to a special degree of reality.” ~ Alton Tobey
- “My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor’s on the very day.” ~ Angela Carter
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“Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.” ~ Marguerite Young
- “I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.” ~ Dylan Moran
- “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.” ~ Ronald Fisher
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“Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago’s mean streets.” ~ Sara Paretsky
- “Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.” ~ Alice Hoffman
- “Completely true to nature!’ – what a lie: / How could nature ever be constrained into a picture? / The smallest bit of nature is infinite! / And so he paints what he likes about it. / And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I would never write realistic prose. I don’t like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.” ~ Marguerite Young
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“True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.” ~ Asger Jorn
- “REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring worm.” ~ Ambrose Bierce , Realism quotes on art
- “Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.” ~ Hans Morgenthau
- “But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we’re trying to go toward a sense of realism – toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we’re mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.” ~ Jim Henson
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“Abstraction and realism work best together.” ~ Ken Danby
- “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting – to non-objective creation.” ~ Kazimir Malevich
- “Realist artists should join together in a worldwide effort… Sharing it with each other and teaching it – that is the key to the success and never-ending beauty and harmony of Realism.” ~ Igor Babailov
- “Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.” ~ Claude McKay
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“I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.” ~ Barbara Hepworth
- “Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won’t have anything to complain about.” ~ Tori Amos
- “Realism is always subjective in film. There’s no such thing as cinema verite.” ~ Crispin Glover
- “We need realism to deal with reality.” ~ Slick Rick
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“Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.” ~ Bette Davis
- “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” ~ Philip K. Dick
- “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.” ~ Jackson Pollock
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“Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “I only understand realism.” ~ Manuel Puig
- “Accurate drawing, accurate color, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror if it could be caught, color and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
- “I am stuck with my passion for the objective world, for the constantly shifting shades of meaning to the events of my life, to the states of being of the people I paint, and to the persistent need to get it right.” ~ Burton Silverman
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“Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.” ~ Alain de Botton
- “Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it.” ~ Walter J. Phillips
- “You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!” ~ William Morris Hunt
- “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough – there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.” ~ Robert Frank
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“I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don’t see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.” ~ Antoni Tapies
- “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components.” ~ Robert Reynolds
- “There is an instinct for realism, a powerful drive to reproduce oneself. The fascination of photorealistic paintings lies partly in their apparent replication of life, but these are not merely replications. These paintings are often out of life scale, varying from over life-size to under life-size, from brilliant, heightened color to pale, undertone hues.” ~ Audrey Flack , Realism quotes about life
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“The average artist, if he chooses, could render an exact drawing of what he sees. Artistic work not only allows but demands some deviation from form and line. Just how far this may go depends on the viewpoint of each painter.” ~ Edgar Alwin Payne
- “Without any intended hubris, I’ve lead a pretty exciting life. What I’ve tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story” ~ Oliver North
- “I suggest that it is the honesty of the attempt to recreate the forms and spaces visually without artistic editing that is one of the hallmarks of realist painting.” ~ Philip Pearlstein
- “Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.” ~ Jamie Wyeth
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“Even though I’m a realist, I try to let the medium show and allow it a certain degree of freedom.” ~ William C. Wright
- “Hyperrealism is more about objectifying… how an object can be portrayed when it is seen through a camera’s lens… all my paintings are about an object being viewed through human eyes.” ~ Liu Dan
- “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
- “a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
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“It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.” ~ Morris Raphael Cohen
- “While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “It feels much better to me to think that an artist is working to show his appreciation of what already has been created than creating things himself.” ~ E. J. Hughes
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“If you finish like a photograph, on the other hand, the picture has as much personality as a photograph.” ~ Emile Gruppe
- “Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.” ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
- “Magic Realism is not new. The label’s new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it’s been around as long as literature has been around.” ~ Terri Windling
