Idealism Quotes

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

~ H.l. Mencken

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.

~ Bauvard

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

~ Ayn Rand

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.

~ William James

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

~ Susan Neiman

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

~ Ayn Rand

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

~ Susan Neiman

I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.

~ Toba Beta

Saya akan lebih mendulukan kebenaran-kebenaran universal, bukan hutang budi, bukan kewajiban moral dan bukan juga pengabdian buta.

~ Putu Wijaya

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

~ Neil Gaiman

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

~ Karl R. Popper

Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.

~ Todd Garlington

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

~ Richard M. Rorty

This world is filled with critics already, being an encourager is what we need to be.

~ The Idealist Merchant

Most of the time we are too critical to ourselves that we don't see worth in small achievements and feel I could done better. Stop Being Hard to Yourself.

~ The Idealist Merchant

Never choose between your heart or brain. Neither instincts nor anything perfectly planned is always right. Follow what heart says but let brain accompany it.

~ The Idealist Merchant

We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

They wish to build a new and better world, and I would be glad if they could succeed, and if I saw any hope of success I would join them. I ask for their plans, and they offer me vague dreams, in which as a man of affairs, I see no practicality. Is is like the the end of Das Rheingold: there is Valhalla, very beautiful, but only a rainbow bridge on which to get to it, and while the gods ma be able to walk on a rainbow, my investors and working people cannot.

~ Upton Sinclair

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

~ Anaïs Nin

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one

~ John Lennon

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

~ Doris Lessing

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.

~ Philip Zaleski

The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.

~ John Howard Griffin

Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Let's always try to paint the truth ... our art must be made to mean something.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her.

~ Bauvard

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.

~ Sharon Salzberg

I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal.

~ Leslie Charteris

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.

~ Robert D. Kaplan

He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun].

~ Iain Pears

our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life

~ Erich Maria Remarque

Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!

~ Eça De Queirós

Honesty can sometimes be so brutal to take in. It's usual to get so drowned in perceived idealism that you can't seem to separate it from honest reality. If, and when, you can separate the two, the gaiety of fantasy is destroyed

~ Ufuoma Apoki

When national ideals are confined to insignificant issues reflective primarily of a personal choice, there lies a problem of distorted priorities.

~ Moutasem Algharati

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.

~ John Nichols