Quotes About Idealism

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Immanuel Kant, un uomo lontanissimo dall'irrazionalismo, osservò una volta che "dal legno storto dell'umanità non si è mai cavata una cosa diritta". È questo il motivo per cui nessuna soluzione perfetta è possibile nelle cose umane - non già soltanto in pratica, ma in linea di principio - e ogni serio tentativo di metterla in atto è destinato con ogni probabilità a produrre sofferenza, delusione e fallimento.

W szale?stwach szlachetnej pasji wi?cej jest sprawiedliwo?ci i nadziei ni? w ponurych rygorach tego ?wiata.

There is now a false idealism of turning Government into God, by a vague notion that it gives everything to everybody; to the denial of the liberty given by God, which is called life. . . .

God help us—we are both men of La Mancha.

I founded Eventbrite when I was 25 and had exactly five professional years under my belt. Perspective was lacking; idealistic views were not. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I'm beyond thrilled I took the leap from a comfortable corporate career into the abyss of founder-hood and entrepreneurship.

I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.

Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in Heaven. To succeed in this world you have to be known to people.

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.

When I first met Tony Blair in 1996, he was open and idealistic, keen to bring a breath of fresh air to government. But something happened - was it just the arrogance of power? - that narrowed Labour's vision from purposeful reform and investment, to peevish and petulant pragmatism.

It is instructive, for instance, to trace the computer industry's decline in vision, idealism, creativity, romance and sheer fun as it becomes more and more important and prosperous.

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed.

There is in most Americans some spark of idealism, which can be fanned into a flame. It takes sometimes a divining rod to find what it is; but when found, and that means often, when disclosed to the owners, the results are often most extraordinary.

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

Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the value of man, in distinction from other natural beings … ; it exempts him from the connection of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence, - a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion.

L]ove is also the idealism of nature … Love alone makes the nightingale a songstress; love alone gives the plant it corolla. And what wonders does love not work in our social life!

This year in school she read Romeo and Juliet, and she told me pragmatically that Romeo was a wimp. He should have just taken Juliet and run away with her, swallowed his pride and worked at some medieval McDonald's. What about the poetry, I asked her. What about the tragedy? And Rebecca told me that that's all very well and good but it isn't the way things happen in real life.

What Mr. Albee most desires is for the Model UN, the entire group of them, all eleven, even the scoundrel Quinn, to be there waiting, when he gets home each dreary night, and there again when he awakes in the morning, all of them politely debating one another with their resplendent voices, their hearts—which have not yet been broken by anything more serious than an unrequited crush or an unfair grade—quietly aglow with everything.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.

Dear young people, do not give up your dreams of a more just world!

In our dreams we are always young.

I wish that I'd written John Lennon's 'Imagine.'

Young people longed to change the world, regardless of the cost to themselves or others.

The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college... the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.