Best 226 quotes in «idealism quotes» category

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

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.

We are a purely idealistic Nation but let no one confuse our idealism with weakness.

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

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values--an identification which alone makesit possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.

...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

A genius is a grown-up that did not grow up.

Always carry what is beautiful in your heart.

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her.

And it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were - and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings anymore.

Anton Chekhov tells the truth neither out of love or respect for the truth, nor yet because, in the Kantian manner, a high duty bids him never to tell a lie, even to escape death. Neither has he the impulse which so often pushes young and fiery souls into rashness: that desire to stand erect, to keep the head high. On the contrary, Chekhov always walks with a stoop, his head bent down, never fixing his eyes on the heavens, since he will read no signs there. If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps.

Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle—that is, being human.

¿Acaso crees que las personas mueren asesinadas por sus actos? No, mueren por sus ideales, porque saben que es el único modo de extinguir el pensamiento único, en general… La historia de nuestra civilización lo ha demostrado con los años.

A significant part of the history of science has been the dethroning of human beings from being the centre of existence. Copernicus and Kepler showed the Earth was not the centre of the universe with everything orbiting the Earth. Darwin showed that the human being is just another animal, which has evolved like all other animals and shares ancestors with all other living species. It is time to dethrone the human view of the world and recognize that it is just another view of the world, no more real or true than the view of any other species.

As you evaluate my argument, resist that urge to come up with abstract hypothetical objections. Compare my examples of honor systems with actual alternatives, not idealized alternatives. Here's an analogy (one that hits a little too close to home for me). Imagine living in a house that badly needs repair. As you compare contractors, you should choose the one who can actually make the house better, not the one who can best imagine the blueprint of a perfect house. The same thinking applies to improving society.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to the validity of the ultimate ideals and values that fluctuates rather than the ultimate ideals and values?

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.

A spade is a spade and diplomacy can’t turn it into a fork overnight.

Because we are so focused on the real world, we keep forgetting how fantasy-driven the Left really is....As with orthodox Marxists, the left adamantly believes it is "Progressive", implying that its adherents know the inevitable and virtuous outcome of history. In the Soviet Union the Party truly believed every five years that Stalin's commands to fix agriculture were bound to work....Lenin and Stalin killed tens of millions of "rich peasants" without ever learning how to feed their country.

Blogging, writing conventional articles, and being science consultant and pocket protector ninja to various web portals and TV programs, quite often trying to promote the penicillin of hard data to people who had no interest in being cured of their ignorance.

At twenty, if you are not an idealist, then you don't have a heart. And if you continue being an idealist at forty, then you don't have a brain.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up.

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.

Călătoria pare să fie destul de lungă. Tânărul pare să se fi îmbarcat în trenul lui Auguste Compte, să fi trecut prin stația teologiei, a cărei deviză era: „Da! Crede și nu cerceta” pentru a poposi și a scormoni acum în tărâmurile metafizicii a cărei deviză este: „Nu!”, iar în depărtare se întrezărește realismul, pe al cărui frontispiciu stă scris: „Deschide ochii și întdrăznește!”.

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in. He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda.

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it.

Bravery usually looked stupid from the outside.

Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that's where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They're the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the system could be reformed.

Der Erdenkreis ist mir genug bekannt. Nach drüben ist die Aussicht uns verrannt: Tor! wer dorthin die Augen blinzelnd richtet, Sich über Wolken seines gleichen dichtet; Er stehe fest und sehe hier sich um; Dem Tüchtigen ist diese Welt nicht stumm

Each species has its own sensory world, which are often very different from each other's sensory world. There is some overlap between these worlds but there are many aspects of one species world which will be completely unknown to members of other species. The human view of the world is only one view and is no more valid than that of any other species.

David Hume, in a moment of acute skepticism, felt panicky in the solitude of his study and had to go out and join his friends in the billiard room in order to be reassured that the external world was really there.

Do you have a fulcrum large enough, and a lever long enough to shift human nature?

Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

He had always had a passion for life and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows. For Phillip, this type was Hayward, fair, languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours of the street.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Honesty can sometimes be so brutal to take in. It's usual to get so drowned in perceived idealism that you can't seem to separate it from honest reality. If, and when, you can separate the two, the gaiety of fantasy is destroyed

How oft the warmth of the sun above Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Idealism + Inaction = Depression