Ideals Quotes

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.

The superior person tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails, and people's minds are led towards the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation.

Life is an aspiration. Its mission is to strive after perfection, which is self-realization. The ideal must not be lowered because of our weaknesses or imperfections.

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

We should not mourn for men of high ideals. Rather we should rejoice that we had the privilege of having had them with us, to inspire us by their radiant personalities.

I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat

The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

Doing is very good, but that comes from thinking. Little manifestations of energy through the muscles are called work. But where there is no thought, there will be no work. Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and who possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

To me the function of politics is to make possible the desirable.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are good, fair, and just, and they want their country to reflect those ideals.

The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Tomorrow I see change, a chance to build a new. Built on spirit intent of heart, and ideals based on truth.

I see you're a man with ideals. I better be going before you've still got them.

Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power in them remains ineffective.

We deserve a president with the knowledge and experience to reassure a nation weary of tweets, lies, and incompetence. And we deserve a president who speaks to the best of who we are and challenges us to live up to our ideals.

We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

Time is an eternal guest that banquets on our ideals and bodies.

My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, itwill turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedomthat America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice.

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party.

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread

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.

There is a lot of work to be done to make sure our leaders reflect the people they are supposed to represent. The more diverse a group of decision makers is, the more informed the decision will be. Until we achieve full representation, we all should understand we are falling short of the ideals of our country.

I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.

So on this Human Rights Day, let us rededicate ourselves to the advancement of human rights and freedoms for all, and pledge always to live by the ideals we promote to the world.

Empire and liberty.

The attitude, 'You can win if you want to badly enough,' means that the will to win is constant. No amount of punishment, no amount of effort, no condition is too 'tough' to take in order to win. Such an attitude can be developed only if winning is closely tied to the practitioner's ideals and dreams.

The roll of honor consists of the names of meant who have squared their conduct by ideals of duty.

A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good--the atavismof an older ideal.

Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.

This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.

It's a generational project just to get America to live up fully to its ideals and to have the kind of society where everybody has a shot, and every kid is getting a good education, and people are getting living wages, and they have decent retirement.

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

We shall have to work like lions, keeping the ideal before us, without caring whether "the wise ones praise or blame us".