303 Quotes About Idealism

The charm of idle dreaming where the dappled shadows dance, all the leafy aisles are teeming with the lures of old romance.

The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.

Let's always try to paint the truth ... our art must be made to mean something.

It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.

Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.

The World usually suffers most at the hands of those who believe in perfection, those who don't realize that there is no one ideal. The truly wise, however, realize that you can only look for an optimal solution, not an ideal solution.

Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.