IDEALISM QUOTES
quotations about idealism
I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this ... idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism, chismism, I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him?
BONO
PENN Address, 2004
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
A Book of Burlesques
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
The Last Hero
Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.
GEORGE CARLIN
attributed, The Idealist's Survival Kit
Every individual should have an ideal and continually hold a mental picture of that ideal till the goal is attained. So should society and official government at Washington have very high ideals for men, women and children. When these ideals have been reached, entertain still higher ideals and cast out old traditions not in harmony with the present time.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Idealism", Human Life from Many Angles
It is a singular fact that men generally, and every man in particular, constantly endeavor to desert real life for one which is altogether artificial, artistic, and, in a word, ideal. The ideal is an image of perfection created by the soul itself.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
EDITH WHARTON
The House of Mirth
Some men -- not all men -- see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it, will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character, but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
The Ideal is the invisible Sun which is always on the meridian of the soul.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
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, JR.
speech delivered at the 50th anniversary of his graduation from Harvard University, "The Class of '61"
The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth. But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
White Nights and Other Stories
You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.
BARACK OBAMA
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 10, 2009
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Dhammapada
We often hear it said; "Oh, he is an idealist," or "that is idealism," as if that attitude of mind was either idiotic or criminal. Criticism, condemnation, recrimination and vituperation are not constructive, but are much in vogue.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Idealism", Human Life from Many Angles
He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf