Idealism Quotes

Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.

James Russell Lowell

The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

James Russell Lowell

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Ideals are the worlds masters.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

John Galsworthy

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people,

Terry Pratchett

Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.

Joseph Joubert

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

Irving Layton

Don't use that foreign word ideals. We have that excellent native word lies.

Henrik Ibsen

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.

William James

The ideal, without doubt, varies, but its enemies, alas, are always the same.

Jean Rostand

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

Neil Kinnock

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Anne Frank

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Albert Camus

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The actual well seen is ideal.

Thomas Carlyle

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Mark Twain, A Biography

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

Malcolm De Chazal

We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

A.E. Housman