Top 87 Quotes About An Idealist
#1. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying 'These things are.' It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, 'Why cannot these things be?
G.K. Chesterton
#2. I'm still an idealist. My manager is always trying to talk me out of it, but that's just the way I am.
Ariel Rechtshaid
#3. I have never been an idealist - that implies you aren't going to achieve something.
Arthur Scargill
#4. I was very excited about the idea that I could be an idealist, that I could be my age, the eager beaver who had hope in the justice system and the one who gets disappointed just like the audience.
Elisabeth Rohm
#5. Do you ever think you're being an idealist? Do you ever wonder if you're holding out for something that doesn't exist? I'm not being pessimistic, and although I'd like to believe that a boom or we or us exists, I'm not sure I do anymore. Maybe I've been holding out for something that's unrealistic.
Karyn Bosnak
#6. Three qualities of greatness stood out in Woodrow Wilson. He was a man of staunch morals. He was more than just an idealist; he was the personification of the heritage of idealism of the American people. He brought spiritual concepts to the peace table. He was a born crusader.
Herbert Hoover
#8. I want to introduce you to Jay, a 'bus-conductor and an idealist. She is not the heroine, but the most constantly apparent woman in this book. I cannot introduce you to a heroine because I have never met one.
Stella Benson
#9. I'm not an idealist anymore, I'm a bitter realist.
Soe Hok Gie
#10. Reality will always prevail so why help it? Be an idealist and see what happens.
Simon Sinek
#11. I am an idealist who believes in reality, and who, therefore, in all i write strive to be real, to keep both my own feet and the feet of my readers on the ground so that no matter how high we dream our dreams will be based on reality
Jack London
#12. Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
H.L. Mencken
#13. The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen - an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love";
Henrik Ibsen
#14. A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#15. Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.
Kristin Hannah
#16. The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.
Trevanian
#17. An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Sydney J. Harris
#18. For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.
Michel Onfray
#19. An idealist who couldn't cope becomes cynical.
Amy Ray
#20. An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.
Henry Ford
#21. I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.
Todd Gitlin
#22. Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and structures is an idealist illusion, as though man were only a soul and not a body as well.
Jurgen Moltmann
#23. In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
Jorge Luis Borges
#24. When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I'm a little bit more of a realist now. I think there's a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it's more about choosing your battles.
Conor Oberst
#25. 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
#26. I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.
Carl Sandburg
#28. You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.
Stanley Kubrick
#29. Brant's an idealist, and he's competent. There are few more dangerous combinations in this world ... Heroes are even more dangerous than idealists.
Patricia C. Wrede
#30. At twenty, if you are not an idealist, then you don't have a heart. And if you continue being an idealist at forty, then you don't have a brain.
Sudha Murty
#31. an idealist is a hypocrite, because he is always trying to become what he is not, instead of being and understanding what he is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#33. First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.
Ellen Glasgow
#34. I'm not an idealist. I know we're not going to be living in a world that's peace and love all the time. But we can live in a world where we kill each other a lot less.
Michael Franti
#35. But Wilson was an idealist who believed that the force of righteousness would overcome all obstacles. He underestimated the need to flatter, cajole, and seduce.
Ken Follett
#37. If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.
Randolph Bourne
#38. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#40. Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth
or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit.
John Lanchester
#41. She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist.
Isaac Marion
#42. Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision
Rick Bayan
#43. We come to think of an idealist as one who seeks to realize what is not in fact realizable. But, it is necessary to insist, to have ideals is not the same as to have impracticable ideals, however often it may be the case that our ideals are impracticable.
Susan Stebbing
#44. The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.
Terry Pratchett
#45. [Hayward] honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophical calm ... He was an idealist.
W. Somerset Maugham
#47. Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.
Margaret Atwood
#48. Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle.
Hugh MacLeod
#49. I've read a couple of reviews that say I'm getting harder in my old age but I don't think that's true at all. I think that you can't help but become a little cynical about life and love but I'm still a romantic, I'm still an idealist.
Madonna Ciccone
#50. An idealist believes that the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. - Sydney J. Harris
David Allen
#51. You see in such a world as this, an idealist -or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist-must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf.
Ford Madox Ford
#52. Politics is not a game for naive thinkers. You may go in as an idealist, but you certainly won't come out as one.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#54. Making the decision to leave Valve strikes me as right up there with turning down the throne to Narnia, but then call me an idealist, and I guess I probably wouldn't want to spend my whole life making new hats for Team Fortress 2 either.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#55. I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
Carl Sandburg
#56. The difference between an idealist and a fanatic is the idealist is only 90% sure he's right.
Jim Payne
#57. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.
Neil Peart
#58. A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.
Julie Burchill
#59. I may be a businessman in that I set up and run companies for profit, but when I try to plan ahead and dream up new products and new companies, I'm an idealist.
Richard Branson
#60. There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying 'I am an American.'
Ronald Reagan
#61. Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.
Alisa Steinberg
#62. I wince at her use of the word "human." I've never liked that differentiation. She is living and I'm dead, but we're both human. Call me an idealist.
Isaac Marion
#63. She lived and breathed the streets, and would lay her neck on the line to protect its occupants. But how did she tell an idealist that the world was not black and white?
Caroline Mitchell
#64. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was. And
James S.A. Corey
#65. Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.
Neal Stephenson
#66. Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
Woodrow Wilson
#67. A strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#68. The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
Albert Camus
#69. Idealism is an ideal which is based on the idea of someone of the perfect world or the perfect life. An idealist fails to understand the limitation of his idea and believes that the real world can be converted into the world of his idea.
Awdhesh Singh
#70. An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.
Ameen Rihani
#71. [The Devil] And after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: 'I'm a realist,' I'll say, 'not a materialist,' heh, heh!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. I'm an idealist
who has outgrown
my idealism
I have nothing to do
the rest of my life
but do it
and the rest of my life
to do it
Jack Kerouac
#74. I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.
Brit Marling
#75. I used to think if it wasn't possible to be a family man and a totally dedicated artist, I'd rather be the former. I'm an idealist and a romantic.
Charlton Heston
#76. No one more cynical than an idealist.
Tanith Lee
#78. I'm an idealist without illusions.
[Ca. 1953, attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 'A Thousand Days'
John F. Kennedy
#79. The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
Richard M. Weaver
#80. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#82. You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.
George Santayana
#83. A pragmatic person sees the dark and the light side of life, while an
idealist sees a life filled with colors.
Eraldo Banovac
#84. The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#85. What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.
John Van Hamersveld
#86. Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#87. When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type--couldn't take it that the world was real.
Graham Swift
