Quotes about ideals-and-idealism

Our ideals are our better selves.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

— Mikhail Bakunin

The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion.

— Stanley Baldwin

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.

— William F. Buckley

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

The actual well seen is ideal.

— Thomas Carlyle

Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

— Willa Cather

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

— Malcolm De Chazal

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

— Winston Churchill

Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?

— Eliza Cook

The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.

— Charles Horton Cooley

There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.

— Calvin Coolidge

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

— Henry Ford

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

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

— John Galsworthy

Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

— Emma Goldman

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

— Sidney J. Harris

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

— Francis Herbert Hedge

Ideals are the worlds masters.

— Josiah Gilbert Holland

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

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

— Herbert Clark Hoover

When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay.

— Libby Houston

You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth.

— Henrik Ibsen

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

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

— Joseph Joubert

Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

— Ellen Key

A perfect human being: Man in search of his ideal of perfection. Nothing less.

— Pir Vilayat Khan

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

— Neil Kinnock

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

— Karl Kraus

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

— Irving Layton

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

— Niccolo Machiavelli

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

— H. L. Mencken

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

— Theodore Roosevelt

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

— Jean Rostand

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

— Carl Sandburg

Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.

— Carl Schurz

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

— Alexander Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Saddle your dreams before you ride em.

— Mary Webb

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

— Oscar Wilde

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