Cowardice is how you decide to be in real life.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment’s glance.
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.
As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.
Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art – the finest of all, perhaps – truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.
It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.
We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can’t eat it.
Life would be very dreary if there were no magic. If the real world were only that veil of tears, I just don’t think could get up in the morning.
But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.
To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.
To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
Creativity only resonates if you infuse real life into the work.
At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.