Quotes about idealism

“The trouble with you, Peter—one of the troubles—is you worry too much about other people’s behavior. And you have too high ideals for them, ideals which you yourself don’t try to live up to.”

“I know I can’t live up to them, so I make a no pretense,” Frigate said.

“But it bothers me that others claim to have these ideals and to be living up to them. If I point out that they aren’t, they get angry.”

The little Moor chuckled. “Naturally. Your criticism threatens their self-image. If that were to be destroyed, they, too, would be destroyed. At least, they think so.”

It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted in the field without becoming part of an edifice.

Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.

You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works.

When was the last time you heard a Republican speak up for a fair shake for the working man or for justice and equality for all men? Those are the ideals we espoused when we were young. Have they changed from boons to evils as we grew old?

Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better.

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it.

The dreamers are the saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

With hindsight, one can perhaps see that unachievable projects were the right monuments to an ideal. Because they were not built, they could not be destroyed. (p. 92)

Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission to willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false. There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.