Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist. — David Ben-Gurion

Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist.

Author: David Ben-Gurion

Insight: We tend to think realism means accepting the world as it actually is—grim, mechanical, predictable. But Ben-Gurion was pointing at something stranger: the most realistic position is acknowledging that the impossible happens all the time. History, nature, and individual lives are full of events that shouldn't have occurred but did. A country born against all odds. A disease cured when medicine had given up. A relationship salvaged from the brink. These aren't fairy tales. They're the texture of reality. The real insight here is that closed-mindedness isn't actually realistic. It's a kind of laziness—deciding in advance that only the obvious and expected can occur, then treating everything else as coincidence or delusion. Actual realists stay alert. They notice when things break their predictions. They watch for the improbable connections, the timing that shouldn't have worked, the moment someone refuses to accept what everyone else has already written off as impossible. These moments happen constantly, which makes them fundamentally realistic, even if we've trained ourselves to explain them away as luck or accident rather than calling them what they are.