The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
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.
In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
The enemy of idealism is zealotry.
Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere.
The Church needs your faith, your idealism and your generosity, so that she can always be young in the Spirit.
The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.
A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.
Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death
There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.
There is no realism without an element of idealism.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it
The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
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.
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.
Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.
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.