Ideals And Idealism

(549 votes)   No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

Winston Churchill
1874-1965, British Statesman, Prime Minister

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(437 votes)   Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet

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(372 votes)   Ideals are the worlds masters.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
1819-1881, American Author

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(348 votes)   Our ideals are our better selves.

Amos Bronson Alcott
1799-1888, American Educator, Social Reformer

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

Logan Pearsall Smith
1865-1946, Anglo-American Essayist, Aphorist

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(317 votes)   Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.

Joseph Joubert
1754-1824, French Moralist

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(310 votes)   The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.

Charles Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

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(299 votes)   If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Georg C. Lichtenberg
1742-1799, German Physicist, Satirist

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(295 votes)   Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Albert Camus
1913-1960, French Existential Writer

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(279 votes)   Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

Willa Cather
1876-1947, American Author

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(277 votes)   The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ''understandable'' world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.

William James
1842-1910, American Psychologist, Professor, Author

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(277 votes)   We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

A. E. Housman
1859-1936, British Poet, Classical Scholar

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(275 votes)   A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(273 votes)   A perfect human being: Man in search of his ideal of perfection. Nothing less.

Pir Vilayat Khan
1916-, Western Philosopher Teacher, Master, Author

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(273 votes)   Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: ''Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.''

James Russell Lowell
1819-1891, American Poet, Critic, Editor

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