Idealism Quotes

Our ideals are our better selves.

Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.

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

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

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

I have never been an idealist - that implies you aren't going to achieve something.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

Don't look back, you can never look back

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?

It's important to start off with ideals, even if they become modified at some later stage.

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Happiness too is inevitable.

Leadership is Idealism in Action.

The actual well seen is ideal.

There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

The idealist regards facts as provisional.

Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute.

Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death

Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.

My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.

A dead martyr is just another corpse.

Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

Without a vision the people perish.

It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to what ever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power.

The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.

Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life.

Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

If a young person has any idealism at all, it's strongest about the time he finishes college.

I was saying to Paul Schrader that he missed the idealism and the passion of that era in Hollywood, but also in American life, that '60s sense of optimism and hope.

Idealism is a fuel for living, and there is an absolute efficiency about how it motivates and propels us.

The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity.

My idealism has not abated, but I have witnessed it withering away nationwide, to the point where at least among the young, to have ideals is akin to being blinkered and oldfashioned.