Quotes Tagged "idealism"

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.

Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

It will take time for you to get the recognition that you deserve. This world will not recognize real people and their real struggle. Because the majority are fake here. They have sold their souls to live the life of luxury and comfort. They deal in the currency of glitz and glamour. They are driven by the pettiness of greed and patheticity of selfishness. They don't recognize honesty, integrity, and real struggle! But you do not become a cynic. You cannot give up on your idealism and integrity. Let the fake heroes and heroines show of their fake happiness by gloating on social media. Don't let them take away the real hero or real heroine in you! Stay real and stay humble. Some of these fake people buy likes and followers to show a fake achievement on social media. Some even buy 'bought awards' to make themselves feel better! You will never do this I know! Just don't give up on your struggle. Stand alone. Stay strong. Live a life of real achievement. Fight On!

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.

I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.

Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.