Quotes About Idealism

The line between courageous faith and foolish idealism is, almost by definition, one angstrom wide.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

This is quite characteristic of most of the churches I saw. So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that—who knows how—claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone

This is quite characteristic of most of the churches I saw. So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that—who knows how—claims the right to call itself "Christian." And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation.

Tu es comme tous les jeunes gens, tu attends le grand amour et la vraie philosophie. Au singulier. Rien qu'au singulier. C'est cela le travers de la jeunesse : le singulier.

We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.

Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?

There was a refreshing purity to their views, which seemed often unaffected by real-world complexities. The

I am a person of great faith and idealism and have been in too many situations too many times to become an eternal pessimist regarding politics.

As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals. It is a relatively important matter to him to be true to his own ideals and to carry them out in actual life.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

I am a hopeless romantic.

They called themselves flower children and advocated free love, yet all too often what they experienced was not so much love as deep disappointment and burned-out minds.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.

She said, 'I mean my husband there, Mr Smith – he was Presidential Candidate in 1948. He's an idealist. Of course, for that very reason, he stood no chance.' What could we have been talking about to lead her to that statement?

How much treachery is always nourished in little overworked centres of somebody else's idealism

Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

'Ready' is dedicated to young people who are not yet jaded and worn down by the realities of this world.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'

I feel like a total hippie right now. I'm passionate about all sorts of things - a lot of boring, cuddly Hallmark things, to be honest.