Idealism Quotes

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.

I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Imagine all of us living in peace, it's too beautiful to just be a dream.

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.

It's a big error to dream of a society where nobody needs to be good.

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

May every day be a new beginning, and every dawn bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill.

All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.

You must try to combine in your life immense idealism with immense practicality. You must be prepared to go into deep meditation now, and the next moment you must be ready to go and cultivate the fields. You must be prepared to explain the intricacies of the scriptures now, and the next moment to go and sell the produce of the fields in the market....The true man is he who is strong as strength itself and yet possesses a woman's heart.

Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!

As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

Imagine all the people Sharing all the world.

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

No artist will tolerate the world for one second as it is.

The secret of Greek Art is its imitation of nature even to the minutest details; whereas the secret of Indian Art is to represent the ideal. The energy of the Greek painter is spent in perhaps painting a piece of flesh, and he is so successful that a dog is deluded into taking it to be a real bit of meat and so goes to bite it. Now, what glory is there in merely imitating nature? Why not place an actual bit of flesh before the dog?

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.

All men in the abstract are just and good.

We must love our friend so much that she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone.

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice -- everywhere open to the truth.

All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity.

Love in the sense of ahimsa has only a limited number of votaries in the world.

I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.

No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable.

I really thought that love would save us all.

We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

If you have not even a little imagination, you are simply a brute. So you must not lower your ideal, neither are you to lose sight of practicality. We must avoid the two extremes.... You must try to combine in your life immense idealism with immense practicality.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government

I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dreamed that was the new City of Friends; Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

Swaraj, without any qualifying clause, includes that which is better than the best one can conceive or have today.

There is no color line in art.

A prince, the moment he is crown'd,Inherits every virtue sound,As emblems of the sovereign power,Like other baubles in the Tower:Is generous, valiant, just, and wise,And so continues till he dies.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -Let it be that great strong land of loveWhere never kings connive nor tyrants schemeThat any man be crushed by one above.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.

You may say i'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying 'I am an American.'

Let the villages of the future live in our imagination, so that we might one day come to live in them!

Imagine ... Imagine no religion.

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.

In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.

Even in a fake democracy, people ought to get what they want once in a while.