“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

—  Robert Greene , book The 50th Law

Source: The 50th Law

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fa…" by Robert Greene?
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene 111
American author 1959

Related quotes

H. Havelock Ellis photo

“The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities…A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: Little Essays of Love and Virtue http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15687/15687-h/15687-h.htm (1922), Ch. 1

Giovanni Sartori photo

“To avoid starting out on the wrong foot we must keep in mind, then, that (a) the democratic ideal does not define the democratic reality and, vice versa, a real democracy is not, and cannot be, the same as an ideal one; and that (b) democracy results from, and is shaped by, the interactions between its ideals and its reality, the pull of an ought and the resistance of an is.”

Giovanni Sartori (1924–2017) Italian journalist and political scientist

The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987), 1. Can Democracy Be Just Anyting?

John Keats photo

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to G. and F. Keats (December 21, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Vladimir Lenin photo

“It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letters on Tactics (April 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

“This explains the instant satisfaction and growing reward which comes to every man who aspires to a higher life, who covets wisdom, who pursues beauty, who idealizes and worships his ideals.”

John William Lloyd (1857–1940) American anarchist, sexologist, utopian theorist and author (1857-1940)

Source: The Natural Man (1902), p. 100

“I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change and better human relationships; but it must not be forgotten that human relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. "You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 243-44: Partly cited in: John Barton (1999, p. 10)

“All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought.”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

Richard Dawkins photo

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Variant: Science is the poetry of reality.
Context: The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Related topics