Realistic Quotes

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.

Bernard M. Baruch

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Life didn't promise to be wonderful.

Teddy Pendergrass

We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.

Pierre Corneille

Do not commit the error common among the young of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.

If one considered life as a simple loan one would perhaps be less exacting.

Eugène Delacroix

Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?

Margaret Titzel

Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.

Plutarch

I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.

Winston Churchill

There's no map there's no master plan there's just people.

Stingray

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

Men expect too much do too little.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

Louise Nevelson

There is no such thing as pure pleasure some anxiety always goes with it.

Ovid

When somebody tells you nothing is impossible ask him to dribble a football.

Anonymous

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

Henry Kissinger

The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.

Gabriel García Márquez

So often we search out the impossible and then throw ourselves into trying to do it.

Anonymous

Prospect is often better than possession.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.

Oliver Goldsmith

For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Elizabeth Bowen

My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.

Ellen Sue Stern

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

General William Sherman

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is but it does not admit of holidays.

Abraham Lincoln

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but boys it is all hell.

General William T. Sherman

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

In war more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently from what we had expected and look differently when near from what they did at a distance.

Karl von Clausewitz

In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.

Moderation in war is imbecility.

Admiral John Fisher

When one's expectations are reduced to zero one really appreciates everything one does have.

Stephen Hawking

No Doctor I don't want to grow young again. I just want to keep on growing old.

Madame de Rothschild

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power but for the passionate sense of the potential for the eye which ever young and ardent sees the possible ... what wine is so sparkling so fragrant so intoxicating as possibility!

Søren Kierkegaard

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

William Hazlitt

We do not write as we want but as we can.

W Somerset Maugham

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction perhaps illusory that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.

The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.

Jean Nicholas Grou

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

Carl Jung

Life has not taught me to expect nothing but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana

Don't spend time beating on a wall hoping to transform it into a door.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger

Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.

Olive Schreiner

It is impossible to control creation.

To seek fulfillment is to invite frustration.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.

Edgar Watson Howe

There is an illusion that has much to do with ... most of our unhappiness. ... We expect too much.

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do what experience tells you to do and what your nerves let you do.

Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.

Johann von Goethe

[Being a parent] is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love you can get a puppy.

Barbara Walters

You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.

If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.

Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

Bertrand Russell

He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.

Terence

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.

Friedrich Hölderlin

Good is not good where better is expected.

Nobody has things just as he would like them. The thing to do is to make a success with what material I have. It is a sheer waste of time and soul-power to imagine what I would do if things were different. They are not different.

Dr. Frank Crane

People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.

Roger de Rabutin

1 2 3 4 Next