Evelyn Underhill Quotes

In art as in politics we must deal with people as they are not as we wish them to be. Only by working with the real can you get closer to the ideal.

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

[Show] business is tough. You never know who or what's real. It's tough when you get in this business, if you have no grounded foundation other than Hollywood, because this business isn't real. We're getting paid to do what we love, but it isn't real.

True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of varietyis but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

Tell me, Do you feel the way I feel? 'Cause nothing else is real In the La La Land machine

We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct.... When it has come to be a hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively ... there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies ... until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.

Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.

Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion.

The love is real in any situation; everything else is just an illusion.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all.

Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real.

We have to look at the substance of something rather than the shadow.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

I write toward both idealism and reality - how things are and how I wish they could be.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.