"Realist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... it may come to seem to us, at all events less realizable; and thus it is that we speak of those who have vividly painted exterior things as realists. Properly speaking, Maupassant is no more a realist than Maeterlinck. He paints a kind of reality which it is easier for us to recognize; that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of Roman youths for a revived Latin scholarly world, while the new humanistic realists wanted to use the old literatures as a means to a new end—that of teaching knowledge that would be useful in the world in which they lived. Monroe has so well expressed the humanistic-realist attitude that a passage from his History is ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... a third aspect of Rubens which cannot be ignored and through which he may be associated with the realist artists of the seventeenth century, who succeeded in preserving a purely Flemish and popular tradition in spite of Italian and monarchist influences. The "Kermesse" of the Louvre and the wonderful landscapes disseminated in so many European museums are the best proofs ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... to Fletcher alone, and to the two jointly. Whoever may be the author, it is the firstling of his dramatic muse, and worth merely a passing mention. How or when their literary friendship began is not known; but since both were friends of Jonson, both prefixing commendatory verses to the great realist's play of 'The Fox,' it is fair to assume that through him they were brought together, and that both belonged to that brilliant circle of wits, poets, and dramatists who made famous the gatherings at ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... its freedom and lawlessness, its love of novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Phonetic Reform. The immediate consequence was that, having achieved his success through realism, he placed realism on a pedestal and worshipped it as the only true (literary) god. Severne became a realist of realists. He ran it into the ground. He would not describe a single incident that he had not viewed from start to finish with his own eyes. He did not have much to do with feelings direct, but such as were ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... face and spat into the sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression, as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real is but a rough manifestation. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... said, "Give me the novel of an idealist that has a purpose. Colonel Ingersol spoke the truth in a recent lecture when he said that a realist can be no more than an imitator or a copyist. His philosophy makes the wax that receives and retains an image of an artist. Realism degrades and impoverishes. The real sustains the same relation to ideal that ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... which has won for itself very unusual and wide respect. Exceptional for ability, as well as for its originality of conception, is "The Republic of God: An Institute of Theology," by Elisha Mulford, a disciple of Maurice and of the realist philosophy, the thought of whose whole life is contained in this and his ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses for the theatre of romance? Set a realist to walk down one of these streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion. Yet Stevenson, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... upon certain general ideas of life and thought as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the relations of class and individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the human mind. From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue great masses ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... which are always the literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and friends of grave ecclesiastics, like Franco Sacchetti[124] earlier in Italy, using language even more violent than that of Vicente, we need not doubt the truth of his sketches. He was perhaps more vivid than the other critics and his satire penetrated deeply for the very reason that he was a realist. There was no doubt some professional exaggeration in the language of his beir[a]o rustics, but his sympathy with the peasants and his wide knowledge of the province of Beira prove that his object was not merely mockery: zombar da gente da Beira[125]. Many of his ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... from one bed to another until he reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the reality. He gives us, not realism, but super-realism, if such ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... company—to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written Jude the Obscure! On the other hand, in the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at her father, as it were half in pity and half in disdain. Did the innocent fellow not then understand the nature of women? Or was he too sentimental to admit it, too romantic to be a realist? ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... anything of my heart. It would have been the most infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere, like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to speak, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... contain a strong element of national woe, much outwardly expressed and inwardly burning rage over the sufferings of his native land; yet they do not carry with a positive reality like that which in a Beethoven Sonata will often call words to our lips." Which means that Chopin was not such a realist as Beethoven? Ehlert is one of the few sympathetic German Chopin commentators, yet he did not always indicate the salient outlines of his art. Only the Slav may hope to understand Chopin thoroughly. But these Ballades are more truly touched by the universal than any other of his works. They belong ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... London life, despite his trend towards caricature, Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men of the people, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... him to all the scenes of Jewish life, he displays before his eyes all its customs and manners, he makes him a witness to all its superstitions, fanaticism, and sordidness of every kind, a physical and social abasement that has no parallel. A faithful observer, an impressionist, an unemphatic realist, he discloses on every page misunderstood lives, extravagant beliefs, movements, evils, greatnesses, and miseries, of which the civilized world had not the slightest suspicion. It is the Odyssey of the ghetto adventurer, the life and journeyings of the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... stage ought to be the home of the ideal; in a word, the imagination should have full sway. The great dramatist is a creator; he is the sovereign, and governs his own world. The realist is only a copyist. He does not need genius. All he wants is industry and the trick of imitation. On the stage, the real should be idealized, the ordinary should be transfigured; that is, the deeper meaning of things should ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Velazquez loved grey and silvery tints, and in the years of his maturity understood relative values perfectly. He knew, too, exactly how far he could go, and never made experiments in search of qualities that were not his. Although he had a certain quality of delicate imagination, he was a realist, and could not paint without a model; he never acquired a mannerism, or applied to one sitter the treatment that some artists seem to keep for types. Every figure he set upon canvas has its own individuality, and, while Velazquez, like ...
— Velazquez • S. L. Bensusan
... Your realist prides himself upon keeping his feet upon the ground. He will go no farther than he can see, and he sees truly enough the evil and imperfection in the world. He notes the weakness and failures of the best intentioned, takes cognizance of the low ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... the end of the Victorian era had attempted to become realistic—had attempted, that is, the absurdly impossible; and photography exposed the absurdity, For no man can be truly a realist, since it is literally impossible to paint or to describe all that the eye sees. When photography became general, this began to be understood; since it was soon seen that the only photographer who could lay any claim to artistic work was the man who selected and ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... published "Blix," another San Francisco story, as short as "McTeague" was lengthy, as light as "McTeague" was heavy, as poetic and graceful as "McTeague" was somber and charmless. Here is a man worth waiting on; a man who is both realist and poet, a man ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the man, who was a born realist, had tried to snatch a kiss from the skipper on the threshold. Fortunately for the success of the venture, it was pelting with rain, and, though a few people gazed curiously at the couple as they went hastily along, they were unmolested, and gained the ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture of loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years later ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... The realist and the romantic tiger are agreed upon one point, however. They both look down on tigers that don't read but merely ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... that writing and thinking he had to do, such important work, too, it would have been so good for him, especially at night. She would not have expressed it thus in words—that would not have been quite nice—but in thought Frances Freeland was a realist. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be written virginibus puerisque; but it is certain that every word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex. Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sundials, and a thousand pleasant things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or some one else. A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. On this the realist's comment was "Mush!" or words to that effect. In like predicament, he would give a detailed account of the properties of Rosa setigera, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 1906-9, the editor of various papers, and senator now, Clemenceau is properly feared; and he was offered, it is said, a place in the present government, but would accept no post but the highest. He preferred his role of political realist and critical privateer, a sort of Mr. Shaw of French politics, hitting a head wherever he ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... and Edmund Waller and sundials, and a thousand quaint and gracious things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or someone else. A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. "Bosh," said the Realist, "I will tell you what a rose is; that is to say, I will give you a detailed account of the properties of Rosa setigera, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five imbricated lobes, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... they are real they are natural. To me the spiritistic 'demonstrations' are intensely human and absorbingly interesting as dramatic material, and yet I hope I am sufficiently the scientist to be alive to the significance of these telekinetic happenings, and enough of the realist to remain critical in the midst of the wildest carnival of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... with me. My scheme of living is based upon being true to myself. You may class me with Baron Munchausen if you choose; I shall not mind so long as I have the consolation of feeling, deep down in my heart, that I am a true realist, and diverge not from the paths of truth as truth ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... read the Politics without recognising and profiting from the insight into the nature of the state which is revealed throughout. Aristotle's failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps these two tendencies too far apart. He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions. But if we are to think of actual politics ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... illustrates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... convenience, whether the guest is too great or too little. We call together many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... photographic? Consider in this connection his own statement: "There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean.... To me the thing that art does for life is to strip ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... of these two young scholars diverged. Emerson became an idealist and an ethical reformer. Elizur Wright became a realist and a political reformer. Realism seems to belong to the soil ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... still find material for another Book of Snobs; put Dickens in society, and he cannot help finding undreamed-of possibilities among bewigged and bepowdered high lords and ladies. For Dickens is romantic and emotional, and interprets the world largely through his imagination; Thackeray is the realist and moralist, who judges solely by observation and reflection. He aims to give us a true picture of the society of his day, and as he finds it pervaded by intrigues and snobbery he proceeds to satirize it and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... me, those horrible realist folk. I like books where things fall as they should rather than as they do; and the poetry where beautiful things happen. Things as they aren't are what ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely landscape for ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in his enterprising debouchings here and there, in curious ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... or term under which we can justly represent it. The first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the Vita Nuova, but the great imaginative realist of the Divine Comedy, the artist who could portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... folly. When an Irish member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies which carry Radicals ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... for his physical strength. On his return, after 1108, he found William lecturing no longer at Notre-Dame, but in a monastic retreat outside the city, and there battle was again joined between them. Forcing upon the Realist a material change of doctrine, he was once more victorious, and thenceforth he stood supreme. His discomfited rival still had power to keep him from lecturing in Paris, hut soon failed in this last effort also. From Melun, where he had resumed teaching, Abelard passed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... you know. And this time it is about something that I do know—exhaustively. Guess where it's laid? In the John Grier Home! And it's good, Daddy, I actually believe it is—just about the tiny little things that happened every day. I'm a realist now. I've abandoned romanticism; I shall go back to it later though, when my own ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... argument, however, by no means commended itself to the pupil of Ockham, who plucked a great stick from the ground and signified his dissent by smiting the realist over the pate with it. By good fortune, the wood was so light and rotten that it went to a thousand splinters, but Alleyne thought it best to leave the twain to settle the matter at their leisure, the more so as the sun was shining brightly once more. Looking ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... marrying a widow are like getting a rose some other fellow have clipped and thorned to wear in your buttonhole, Crabtree; they ain't nothing like 'em." Thus poet and realist made acknowledgment each after his and her own order of mind, but actuated by the identical ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... ordinary to the fair Parisians, whom his admirers christened "a Watteau realist" and his detractors a "photographer of gowns and mantles," often received at breakfast or at dinner the beautiful persons whose feature he had reproduced, as well as the celebrated and the well known, who found ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... unimpulsive one. She did things, said things, and felt things with the instantaneous intensity of the poetic temperament; but she was quite capable of looking at them afterward, and weighing them with the cool and unbiassed judgment of the most phlegmatic realist. Hence she often had most uncomfortable seasons, in which one side of her nature took the other side to task, scorned it and berated it severely; holding up its actions to its remorseful view, as an elder sister might chide a younger one, who ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... writer of literature, these books show Mr. Garland to be a realist, that is, a writer who deals with the facts of real life, but as you read Boy Life on the Prairie, you will see that he is fond of the ideal, of the fanciful, and of descriptions of simple rural scenes. The latter quality is ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... modern times, the term "Realism" has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediaeval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considerations which ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Probably the sketches are true enough, and pity 'tis true: for example, the sketches in "Under the Deodars" and in "The Gadsbys." That worthy pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as the characters in "La Conquete de Plassans." But Mr. Kipling is too much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness unbroken, unceasing. We know that "Gaddy" is a brave, modest, and hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death, certainly ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... effect, I repeat. If you remember anything of the Lectures I gave you through last year, you must be gradually getting accustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art, as one essentially Chiaroscurist, as opposed to Gothic color; Realist, as opposed to Gothic imagination; and Despairing, as opposed to Gothic hope. And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three conditions. Only, observe, the chiaroscuro is simply the technical result of the two others: a Greek painter likes light and shade, first, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... POET 237 I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning—"romantic" temperament, "realist" senses—blending of their donnees in his imaginative activity—shifting complexion of "finite" and "infinite" 237 II. His "realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and veracity of intellect and senses 239 III. But his realism qualified ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... referred to, in comparison with other contemporary sociologists, as a realist. This is a reference to the controversy of the medieval philosophers in regard to the nature of concepts. Those who thought a concept a mere class-name applied to a group of objects because of some common characteristics were called nominalists. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon; and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ. Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... about. Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited 'reality' AB INITIO, and why, throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemological realist. [Footnote: I need hardly remind the reader that both sense- percepts and percepts of ideal relation (comparisons, etc.) should be classed among the realities. The bulk of our mental 'stock' consists ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... artist's bold, proud features with singular curiosity. "The French Academy, I presume, are individually as appreciative of human weaknesses as most men; but taken collectively, some spirit higher and stronger than their own keeps them unanimous in their rejection of the notorious Realist who sacrifices all the canons of art and beauty to the discussion of topics ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... woodlands, In God's Way, of passages of pure idealism." Yes, he returns—"in measure." He is "capable of idyllic passages." In other words, his nature reasserts itself, and he remains an imperfect convert. "He has striven hard to be a realist, and at times he has seemed to acquiesce altogether in the naturalistic formula, but in truth he has never had anything essential in common with M. Zola." In other words, he has fallen between two stools. He has ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark gray, shining eyes; he was very thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I shall be told, perhaps, that red cheeks are not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
