Idealism Quotes - Page 5

• A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

  John Steinbeck

  Struggle, Animal, Community

  Edward Flanders Ricketts, John Steinbeck (1978). “The Outer shores”

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• This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.

  Adolf Hitler

  Attitude, Sacrifice, Men

  "Mein Kampf". Book by Adolf Hitler, Chapter 11, Ralph Manheim translation, 1925.

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• I think the American Dream used to be achieving one's goals in your field of choice-and from that all other things would follow. Now, I think the dream has morphed into the pursuit of money: Accumulate enough of it, and the rest will follow. We've become more materialistic. For balance, I think we need to get back to idealism and patriotism, but also be realistic with our monetary goals.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Dream, Thinking, Goal

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• In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.

  Billy Corgan

  Way, Kind, Perfectionism

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• Visualizing how you want to be is [an] effective way to move toward your goal.

  Ellen Bass

  Moving, Goal, Way

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• Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Thinking, Issues, Violence

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

  Penn Jillette

  Creativity, And Love, Love Respect

  Penn Jillette (2012). “God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales”, p.1, Simon and Schuster

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• I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Opposites, Natural

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• I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Hurt, Real, Book

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.

  Douglas Adams

  Running, Mean, Exercise

  Douglas Adams (2017). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts”, p.128, Pan Macmillan

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• We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Depressing, Agency, Self

  "Waiting For The Barbarians" by Lewis H. Lapham, (p. 197), 1997.

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• The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

  Dennis Prager

  Narcissism

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• [in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind.

  Anais Nin

  Destiny, Soul, Dreamer

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• But it does no good--solves nothing--to distance myself from the front lines of human need by using the mail as a safe shelter. I believe that serving the best ends of humanity means getting out in the middle of it just as it is, not staying home writing checks and thinking hopeful thoughts. The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are. And you're damned right that's idealistic. No apology. When idealism goes into the trash as junk mail, we're finished.

  Robert Fulghum

  Distance, Believe, Mean

  Robert Fulghum (2010). “Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door”, p.173, Ivy Books

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• Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Tired, Exercise, Yale

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• Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. . . . It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forebearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that-being what it is-it falls so short of in fact and in deed.

  Clare Boothe Luce

  Lying, Fall, Creative

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• I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

  Barack Obama

  Hope, Fighting, Talking

  Barack Obama's Victory Speech in Chicago, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2012.

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• Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  John Keats

  Beauty, Truth, Philosophy

  "Ode on a Grecian Urn" l. 46 (1820)

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• I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it, I did the thing in life I wanted to do - Writing.

  Max Ehrmann

  Writing, Things In Life, Disease

  Max Ehrmann (2017). “The Desiderata of Happiness”, p.4, Souvenir Press Ltd

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• Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

  Lorrie Moore

  Goodbye, Emotional, Years

  Interview with Louisa Kamps, www.elle.com. September 16, 2009.

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• We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?

  Jack Kornfield

  Buddhism, Suffering, Doe

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• A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.

  Lin Yutang

  Wild Geese, Might, Too Much

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

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• Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

  William James

  Letting Go, Spiritual, College

  "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature". Book by William James, 1902.

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• One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

  John Berger

  Life, Doctors, Knowing

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• Nothing matters more to the future of this Nation than insuring that our young men and women learn to believe in themselves and believe in their dreams, and that they develop this capacitythat you develop this capacity, so that you keep it all of your lives. I believe one of Americas most priceless assets is the idealism which motivates the young people of America. My generation has invested all that it has, not only its love but its hope and faith, in yours.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Love, Dream, Believe

  Remarks at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, January 14, 1971.

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