Top 109 Naturalism Quotes & Sayings

In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.

Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.

I'm not interested in putting naturalism on stage - I want passion.

In particular, what I loved about 'Creep' and 'The One I Love' was the combination of naturalism, horror, and comedy that felt kind of new and fun.

For my money, when you're doing an on-camera performance, unless it's for something particularly stylised, you are, by and large, striving for naturalism.

I'm not able to completely escape naturalism. It's very difficult to escape from naturalism without being too dry. That's what I try to do in my cinema - escape naturalism and do films that are, at the same time, realistic but have a lot of fantasy. It's very difficult in cinema to get away from what life is about, from real life. The way the actors work has to be realistic - you can't do Baroque acting - so it's very complicated. And, we're human beings, so we're not perfect. I'm trying to do something different.

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Peter Morgan's writing is so much about what you don't say: you're saying one thing but there's 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov... they're masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.

I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.

I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

I love faces that have freckles. I love faces that have wrinkles. For me, beauty is naturalism, I guess.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

'W1A' is heightened naturalism, whereas 'The Windsors' is like the fever dream of a 'National Enquirer' reader.

Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.

All Jews, however, in proportion as they are one with the leaders and rulers of their race, will oppose the influence of the supernatural Life of Grace in society and will be an active ferment of Naturalism.

Because to me, what is interesting about this movie [Real Steel] is its combination of relationship naturalism with. It's like a single conceit movie. The world and the people are very much the way we know them to be, but this sport has evolved.

It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.

Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone - not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us.

Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.

There has certainly been a great deal of work addressing the relationship between naturalism and the first-person perspective. Quite a number of philosophers have suggested that there are features of the first-person perspective that naturalism just cannot accommodate, whether it be qualitative character, or consciousness, or simply the ability we have to think of ourselves in a distinctively first-person manner.

Now, as when I made films that were too autobiographical, the problem is how to escape naturalism. If you tell a strictly true story, because the way you are telling it is false, it creates naturalism. But I become a naturalist. And to become a naturalist is something I avoid. It is fake life - that is the problem. It is because we are familiar with situationnisme, and the critique of the spectacle, et cetera, which is a very fair criticism. People who have no life, and who watch this fake life on a screen - it's a very alienated situation. And that's what situationnisme is about.

Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.

The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.

The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.

Nature rarely does anything mathematically perfect, and naturalism results from imperfections and deviations.

In naturalism, man is actually very insignificant, but arrogates to himself stupendous power. In Christianity, man is actually the apex of created significance, but is called to see it in abject humility.

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

We've all been influenced by American naturalism, and to ignore that entirely would be impossible for me as someone who works primarily in film.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

'Batman Begins' came out and it was really successful, and it had gritty naturalism. And suddenly... I can't tell you how many movies I was pitched where it was, 'We want to do what you did with 'Batman' but with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' or whatever.

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.

In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism.

I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it's not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea.

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.

I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies.

Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else.

"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.

When you are playing an egomaniac running a fantastical ship, you don't want him to be too suburban. Naturalism doesn't work on the high seas.

Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.

American naturalism is what my indulgent actor side loves: a bit of Tennessee Williams, a bit of Clifford Odets, August Wilson - I would just love to tackle some of that.

If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.

I always suspend logic for emotion. If it feels real, or it feels like what I'm going for, we should abandon reality a little bit and go for that. I'm not a documentarian. We're not trying to shoot things for naturalism.

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

There's some actors that go easily between drama and comedy because they play the naturalism of the role, and they just have natural timing.

To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God.

The challenge and the goal was to get inside Owen's [Suskind] world, because I really wanted to see it through his point of view. To achieve that naturalism, I used a screen in front of a camera as I interviewed him

It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality...If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

Obviously we know Bill Hader is funny and charming, but my question is, can he do raw humanity and naturalism? I think so.

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.