303 Quotes About Idealism

Do you have a fulcrum large enough, and a lever long enough to shift human nature?

Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

There is something mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being.

Philosophic concepts are a form of sentiment. Conflicts between lofty ideas and vouchsafed values are endemic for any thinking person.

Der Erdenkreis ist mir genug bekannt.Nach drüben ist die Aussicht uns verrannt:Tor! wer dorthin die Augen blinzelnd richtet,Sich über Wolken seines gleichen dichtet;Er stehe fest und sehe hier sich um;Dem Tüchtigen ist diese Welt nicht stumm

Everything is idea, nothing is ideal.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.

The PSR is not an abstract principle. It is embodied ontologically by way of Euler's formula, which is what the PSR reduces to mathematically. Anyone who denies that the universe is made of reason is automatically an irrationalist, and their irrational opinions can be dismissed. There is nothing more ironic, and irrational, than irrationalists trying to give reasons why the universe is not made of reason.