Idealism Quotes

Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

— Mary Parker Follett

“We cannot embrace radical idealism,”

— Kaiten Nukariya

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

— Herbert Hoover

Without a vision the people perish.

— Ronald Reagan

Don't look back, you can never look back

— Don Henley

The idealist regards facts as provisional.

— Mason Cooley

The ideal self is the wish to be like God.

— Michael Barbarulo

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

— Ayn Rand

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

— Alexander Smith

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

— John Galsworthy

You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.

— Jon Stewart

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

— William F. Buckley, Jr

It took years of wear and tear before idealism crumbled like so much bric-a-brac.

— James Siegel

You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.

— Austin O'Malley

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

— George Carlin

I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it, I did the thing in…

— Max Ehrmann

All of us realize that war requires action. What is sometimes harder for us to realize is that peace and neutrality also…

— Lyndon B. Johnson

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and…

— Joe Biden

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

— Jacques Barzun

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…

— Terence McKenna

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

— H.L. Mencken

Sad that our finest aspiration, Our freshest dreams and meditations, In swift succession should decay, Like Autumn leaves that rot away.

— Alexander Pushkin

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is…

— Raymond Chandler

The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and…

— Herman Melville

For all the idealism that propels him through the story, if you read between the lines you may see that at a…

— James Vance

“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot…

— Anne Lamott

I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men…

— Calvin Coolidge

Paradoxically, capital has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred…

— Timothy Morton

Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that…

— Germaine Greer

We have a system which, though far from perfect, is strong with idealism. It gives elbow room for men of all races…

— William O. Douglas

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is…

— Josiah Royce

“Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck…

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Nothing matters more to the future of this Nation than insuring that our young men and women learn to believe in themselves…

— Richard M. Nixon

I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but…

— Martin Luther King, Jr

“It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their…

— Robert C. Tucker

“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of…

— Evald Ilyenkov

But it does no good--solves nothing--to distance myself from the front lines of human need by using the mail as a safe…

— Robert Fulghum

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a…

— William James

“10. Idealism is a Potent Medicine for Self-created Mental Disease. In so far as Buddhist idealism refers to the world of sense,…

— Kaiten Nukariya