Herman Melville Quotes

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against.

Gone is the blinding glow in his hands - gone, too, is the illusion of purity and beauty! In it's place all that remains is mind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!

He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

Many people would rather have fine words and false hopes than the truth which is unacceptable.

I was one of those kids who thought I could be the president of England when I grew up if I wanted to. Then I started acting and realized life is hard, and people are mean. And there's no president of England, and I'm not British.

There's certain classes you have to take, certain things you have to do, certain money you must have. Then, if you listen to the counselors and social workers and everybody else talking at you, you would think that once you got out of high school and college, life would be beautiful. But it's not.

Don't get any big ideas They're not gonna happen.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

Sometimes, when you want to laugh, reality steps in.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

It gets harder the more you know. Because the more you find out the uglier everything seems.

Everything is so dreamy when you are young. After you grow up it kind of becomes -- just real.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." "Are you saying we shouldn't hope?" "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!

Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.

In a world that's ugly and a lie, it's hard to even want to try.

The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert waste.

In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

Reality is never a golden age.

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

No," says Ariana. "It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that's all.