William McIlvanney Quotes

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

I go with what I know and what I see, and I believe in reality.

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

I know we live in a materialistic world. I am not living on Cloud Nine; I am not living in Disneyland. I understand all that.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Truth stands for the fact, nonviolence negates the fact.

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

The material universe exists only in the mind.

How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.

The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.

Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

The idealist regards facts as provisional.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life.

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex.

One stands, in fact, in awe of the Constitution of the United States, though it is an idea and not quite a reality.

Don't fight a fact, deal with it.