Quotes About Idealism

In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he knows he can't.

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.

I'm an idealist who has outgrown my idealism I have nothing to do the rest of my life but do it and the rest of my life to do it

I'm an idealist who has outgrown my idealism I have nothing to do the rest of my life but do it and the rest of my life to do it

The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest, and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.

Only one American has given his life for Iranian democracy. He was a young idealist from Nebraska named Howard Baskerville. In 1907, fresh out of Princeton, Baskerville went to Iran as a schoolteacher. He found himself in the midst of a revolution against tyranny, and was carried away with passion for the democratic cause.

Supergirl is this unattainable, idealistic optimist of an alien, and all of us can escape into her world, and she always saves the day.

Long live all us crazy soldiers Who were born under calico skies May we never be called to handle All the weapons of war we despise

The inevitableness the idealism and the blessing of war as an indispensable and stimulating law of development must be repeatedly emphasized.

Getting married is the boldest and most idealistic thing that most of us will ever do.

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.

I am convinced that an immense number of people who have children should not have them, and do not particularly want them, except as "symbols" of family life. What they want are ideal children, not real ones; and as soon as the real ones show no intention of conforming to the ideal in the parent's mind, they are treated as burdens, shipped away to school or otherwise neglected.

Those who feel plagued by not being good enough are often drawn to idealistic worldviews that offer the possibility of purifying and transcending a flawed nature. This quest for perfection is based in the assumption that we must change ourselves to belong. We may listen longingly to the message that wholeness and goodness have always been our essence, yet still feel like outsiders, uninvited guests at the feast of life.

When you are young you believe the world is all yours, glorious and exhilarating and fascinating and full of promise and trumpets and drums and marches and new worlds," said Charles. "We don't ask ourselves what we are living for then. We know. But we forget, later, or it all seems a foolish dream.

My father is a real idealist, and he's all about learning. If I asked for a pair of Nikes growing up, it was just a resounding 'No.' But if I asked for a saxophone, one would appear and next day and I'd be signed up for lessons. So anything to do with education or learning, my father would spare no expense.

The Peace Corps is guilty of enthusiasm and a crusading spirit. But we're not apologetic about it.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and structures is an idealist illusion, as though man were only a soul and not a body as well.

never ceased to amaze him how a discredited philosophy and a repressive nation still attracted idealists.