Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.

Imagination creates reality.

True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.

I know that some endeavor to throw the mantle of romance over the subject and treat woman like some ideal existence, not liable to the ills of life. Let those deal in fancy who have nothing better to deal in; we have to do with sober, sad realities, with stubborn facts.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

It was taunted as reality. It was dangled as a carrot. In terms of people's hopes and dreams, to say that that is less of a reality than the daily grind they find themselves in is maybe not correct.

I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

The romantic idealism of my youth has been replaced with realism and hard work at what I love.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Art must take reality by surprise.

It is only through such real-life daily struggles and challenges that a genuine sensitivity to human rights can be inculcated. This is a truth that is not limited to school education: it applies to all of us.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

True Americanism is practical idealism. Its aims, instead of being materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. In this way, the U.S. can provide and express ideals that strike a chord in humans everywhere - a declaration of independence on behalf of all the peoples of the world.

In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction.

As an actor, you work to the script: that's our main priority. But you have to be aware and look around for things that help you bring that little bit extra, that touch of realism that rams the point home.

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.

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

Nothing can express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of St. Augustine - 'Beauty is the splendor of Truth.'

The more closely you get in touch with your dreams, the more able you are to make them real. The more vividly you consider how you want your world to be, the more real and effective tools you will have for making it so.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.

Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers.

It takes no imagination to live within your means.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.

A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We create vessels in which life happens.

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.

The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.