Quotes About Idealism

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —

Sometimes when you're around I've been tempted to kiss you suddenly and tell you that you were just an idealistic boy with a lot of caste nonsense in his head.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Gatsby, he had a grand vision for his life since he was a boy. No amount of fire could ever challenge the fairy tale he had stored up in his heart

You got some idealist idea about man being some noble creature Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and all this crap about how we can change human nature. You can't change it, you're beating your head against a brick wall. People have had a couple of million years to change and they ain't changed yet, have they?

The statesmen who led the Allied countries through war and depression knew better and resolved to give idealism a chance.

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

The dreamers of ideals [?] – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They're idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They're enchanted by life's surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it's beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

For me this sun, these meadows and these flowers are enough. But if they weren't enough, What I would want is a sun more sun than the sun, Meadows more meadows than these meadows, Flowers more flowers than these flowers— Everything more ideal than what it is, in the same way and same manner! That thing over there more there than it is!

That's what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.

I am glad that mankind on the whole are dreamers.

I tend to be a bit of a dreamer.

There's a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to only show the good side of yourself and then when you come to power, the bad side comes out.

In explaining why the UK was not a signatory to these agreements, the question is not why it turned its back on Europe, but why Britain's own combination of idealism, fear and self-interest produced a different policy calculation – and why that changed in the years that followed.

A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions—except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were "hypocrites" —a term which every race has its counterpart of.

El sueño del hombre nuevo se paga inevitablemente con el sufrimiento del hombre realmente existente.

That's how it's done, Trell. You break your heart against this stony world. You fling yourself at it, on the side of good, and you do not ask the cost. That's how you do it.

I thought I could use idealism to solve my inner conflicts, but in healing my inner conflicts I destroyed my idealism.

For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved.

Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?

He wanted to make the world better, but, according to Rodney, the world wasn't interested.

Charles Dickens, visiting the United States five years earlier, had described Washington as "the City of Magnificent Intentions,"12 with "spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.