Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. I...t is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the... cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or id...ealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius ... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monke...ys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for ma...gic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explain...ing mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »