Idealism Quotes - Page 2

• If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  School, Succeed, Technique

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• The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true."

  James Branch Cabell

  Tunnels, Light, Track

  The Silver Stallion bk. 4, ch. 26 (1926) See Leibniz 3; Voltaire 7; Voltaire 8

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• What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal... the kind that's always existed... No. They couldn't care less about that.

  Pablo Picasso

  Always Trying, People, Personality

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• The natural idealism of youth is an idealism, alas, for which we do not always provide as many outlets as we should.

  Sargent Shriver

  Youth, Natural, Should

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• I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.

  Norman Rockwell

  Baseball, Mother, Kids

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• Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.

  Douglas Portway

  Artist, Expectations, Flow

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• Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Men, Self, Doe

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• 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

  Political, Reform, Negative

  Charles Horton Cooley (1909). “Two Major Works: Social Organization. Human Nature and the Social Order”, Glencoe, Ill., Free P

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• All each ism does, in its revolt against the inadequacy of the previous one, is to thoroughly upset the order of terms of this ideal entity and to bring to the fore yet another inadequacy.

  Jean Helion

  Order, Upset, Doe

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• Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?

  Pearl S. Buck

  Believe, Fighting, Gun

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• My idealism is clearly one reason I'm an artist. I see art as one of mankind's more sublime acts, as a vital counterbalance to our base impulses .

  Richard Schmid

  Art, Sublime, Reason

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

  Stuart Pearson Wright

  Important, Stage, Ifs

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

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Ivory Tower, Towers, Gutters

  Afterthoughts (1931) "Other People"

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• Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.

  Claude McKay

  Reality, Air, Political

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

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  House Of Cards, Air, Castles

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook F 39, 1799.

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• You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Mother, Hard Work, Men

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.8255, Delphi Classics

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• Our ideals are our better selves.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Inspirational, Self, Ideals

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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• In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

  Anne Frank

  Motivational, Believe, Divorce

  FaceBook post by Anne Frank from Apr 07, 2015

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• In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

  Anne Frank

  Believe, Heart, Thinking

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• You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

  Norman Douglas

  Business, Advertising, Nigeria Independence

  SouthWind ch. 7 (1917)

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• 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 Sr.

  Men, Philanthropy, Ends

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard A. Posner (1997). “The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.”, p.95, University of Chicago Press

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• No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Doe, Penalties, Periods

  Alfred North Whitehead, Lucien Price (2001). “Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead”, p.272, David R. Godine Publisher

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• Don't look back, you can never look back

  Don Henley

  Looks, Idealism And Realism

  Song: The Boys of Summer, Album: Building the Perfect Beast

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• Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.

  Carl Schurz

  Love, Change, Sports

  Carl Schurz, Frederic Bancroft (1913). “Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz”, Putnam Juvenile

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• Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Disappointment, Humor

  "A Note on George Carlin about Steroids and Sports from a Practical Idealist" by Carol Smaldino, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 19, 2009.

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