Ideals Quotes - Page 14

• One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.

  Edward Abbey

  Play, Common Sense, Healthy

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.21, RosettaBooks

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• There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

  Edward Abbey

  Civilization, Names, Worthy

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.23, RosettaBooks

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• Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

  Charles de Gaulle

  Art, Reality, Acting

  Press conference, June 30, 1955.

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• One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

  Sigmund Freud

  Horse, Powerful, Goal

  "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Lecture 31 : The Anatomy of the Mental Personality". 1932.

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• 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

  Names, World, Way

  William James (1970). “Essays in Pragmatism”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

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• India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

  Will Durant

  Mother, Philosophy, Race

  "The Case for India". Book by Will Durant, 1931.

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• Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

  John F. Kennedy

  Religious, Attitude, Believe

  Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, delivered 12 September 1960 at the Rice Hotel in Houston, TX

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• Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.

  E. L. James

  Hero, Long, Expectations

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• So much American science fiction is parochial - not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way.

  Poul Anderson

  Technology, Years, Way

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• The ideals of the party were close to me, and I have tried to adhere to those principles all my life. In essence, they are the same as in the Ten Commandments in the Bible. I will never change my convictions

  Valentina Tereshkova

  Change, Party, Essence

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• If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action - which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate - then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.

  Elena Kagan

  Ideas, Might, Action

  "Kagan Argued for Government 'Redistribution of Speech'" by Matt Cover, www.cnsnews.com. May 11, 2010.

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• Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Inspirational, Motivational, Work

  Swami Vivekananda, Vivekananda Kendra (2009). “Swami Vivekananda's Rousing Call to Hindu Nation”, p.140, Vivekananda Kendra

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• The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Art, Rights, Diversity

  "Straight outta Brooklyn" by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. December 13, 2003.

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• That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

  John Updike

  Marriage, Real, Heaven

  John Updike (2011). “Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism”, p.467, Random House

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• Shake off those gloomy feelings. Drive them away. Fix your mind and pleasures upon what is before you.All is bright if you will think it so. All is happy if you will make it so. Do not dream. It is too ideal, too imaginary. Dreaming by day, I mean. Live in the world you inhabit. Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them. Turn them to your advantage.

  Robert E. Lee

  Dream, Mean, Thinking

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• When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Beautiful, Art, Use

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• No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.

  William Butler Yeats

  Art, People, Conquer

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.362, Simon and Schuster

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• Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Attitude, Self Confidence, Years

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• The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.

  George Bellows

  Inspiring, Artist, Creative

  Marjorie B. Searl, George Bellows, Ronald Netsky, University of Rochester. Memorial Art Gallery (2003). “Leaving for the country: George Bellows at Woodstock”, Memorial Art Gallery of Univ

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• To a large extent, the American church has become merged with the world. It has adopted so many of the world's ideals and standards that it has lost its ability to stem the tide of crime, deception and immorality that is sweeping the nation. For millions of church members there is no deep commitment to the cause of Christ, no regularity of attendance at public worship, no sacrificial giving, no personal religious discipline.

  Billy Graham

  Christian, Religious, Commitment

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• Any leaders who disappoint the people, ideals and promises by which they were appointed are by definition themselves dis-appointed.

  Vanna Bonta

  Leadership, People, Promise

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• After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

  James Boswell

  Philosophy, Science, Feet

  James Boswell (1998). “Life of Johnson”, p.333, Oxford University Press, USA

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• When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us

  Robert Smithson

  Artist, Past, Garden

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.155, Univ of California Press

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• A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.

  Shana Alexander

  Get Well, Recovery, Sleep

  Shana Alexander (1970). “The feminine eye”, McCall Pub. Co

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• He who, having lost one ideal, refuses to give his heart and soul to another and nobler, is like a man who declines to build a house on the rock because the wind and rain have ruined his house on the sand.

  Constance Naden

  Wisdom, Rain, Heart

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