Top 72 Quotes About Ideal Self
#1. Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach's second partita.
Ian McEwan
#2. The ideal is within you, and the obstacle to reaching this ideal is also within you. You already possess all the material from which to create your ideal self. - THOMAS CARLYLE
Leo Tolstoy
#3. In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who's comfortable 'putting himself out there.'
Susan Cain
#4. The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.
(from The structure of desire and recognition)
Robert B. Brandom
#5. A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.
Susan Cain
#6. Living true to your ideal self may seem impossible but if you work hard on it, you can see it is achievable.
Auliq Ice
#7. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal - the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.
Susan Cain
#8. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires ...
Elizabeth Hardwick
#9. Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Susan Griffin
#10. In photography we must learn to seek, not the 'picture,' not the aesthetic of tradition, but the ideal instrument of expression, the self-sufficient vehicle for education.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#11. As for my ideal type, I like girls who don't have powerful presence, and not self-centered. I'd like her to have a light skin, and a calm personality.
Yesung
#12. Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.
Frances E. Willard
#13. For this - the ideal, as it is set - should be not as to what others should do to make the ideal situation for self, but as to how self may apply itself in its ideal to bring the ideal relationships with others.
Edgar Cayce
#14. All of us wish we'd had perfect childhoods, with a mother and father who modeled ideal parental attitudes and taught us to internalize the tenets of self-love. Many of us, however, did not.
Marianne Williamson
#15. The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal.
Miguel Ruiz
#16. I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine's physical attributes ... it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who's ideal
or completely shattered.
E. Lockhart
#18. An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.
Aldous Huxley
#19. Sometimes it's best to trade an ideal for something more practical that you can guarantee.
A.J. Darkholme
#20. The real American ideal of cool which is building businesses, protecting freedom at home and abroad, taking responsibility for your actions, and leaving other people alone to live as they damn well please.
Greg Gutfeld
#21. Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we're trying to live up to. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at.
Pema Chodron
#22. The heart becomes wide by forgetting self, but narrow by thinking of the self and pitying one's self. To gain a wide and broad heart you must have something before you to look upon, and to rest your intelligence upon - and that something is the God-ideal.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#23. One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.
Cortney S. Warren
#24. Your 'Ideal Parallel World' must be so grand that if you told it to 99% of your friends, they would laugh - some because they would think you were joking and some because they would think the goal impossible.
Kevin Michel
#25. The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#26. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Olaf Stapledon
#27. War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.
Arthur Koestler
#28. It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
Richard Wilbur
#29. I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.
Joseph Conrad
#30. Choice is the declaration by self that a certain ideal of self shall be realized.
John Dewey
#31. Power, as human beings exercise power, to me means the ability to change: the ability to change oneself, the ability to change one's community. And the positive use of power is transformation of self and community toward a higher ideal, toward a healed world.
Katharine Jefferts Schori
#32. There are as many routes to writing success as there are writers who got there. My advice, however, applies across the board: read widely, learn the craft by whatever means you can - workshops and writing programs are ideal, but even self-study can work - apply what you learn, and persevere.
Therese Fowler
#33. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.
Isaac Marion
#34. I emphasize self-esteem, self-confidence, and dignity, not as an ideal, but as a real test of community organization. Without leadership development, community organizations do not have staying power.
Paul Wellstone
#35. It is something great and greatening to cherish an ideal; to act in the light of truth that is far-away and far above; to set aside the near advantage, the momentary pleasure; the snatching of seeming good to self; and to act for remoter ends, for higher good, and for interests other than our own.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
#36. And let us never forget that in honoring our flag, we honor the American men and women who have courageously fought and died for it over the last 200 years, patriots who set an ideal above any consideration of self. Our flag flies free today because of their sacrifice.
Ronald Reagan
#37. Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?
Abraham H. Maslow
#38. I happen to think we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham
#39. We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
R.D. Laing
#40. Shame is deeply rooted in identity. And the "self-ideal" we create for ourselves can often incorporate a lot of expectations that simply aren't included in God's ideal for us.
Matt Chandler
#41. After reading about ten of those self-help books, I saw that they were leading nowhere. They have an immediate effect, but that effect stops as soon as I close the book. They're just words, describing an ideal world that doesn't exist, not even for the people who wrote them.
Paulo Coelho
#42. The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Eric Hoffer
#43. So often we wait for the climate and conditions in life to be perfect before we feel safe enough to step forward, trust, and be our authentic selves. What we don't realize is that in order to create the ideal climate we are waiting for, we must be authentic first.
Sonia Choquette
#44. Marriage provides an ideal setting for overcoming any tendency to be selfish or self-centered. I think one of the reasons that we are counseled to get married early in life is to avoid developing inappropriate character traits that are hard to change.
Richard G. Scott
#45. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
#46. In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man.
Herbert Spencer
#47. Your ideal life is your real life. Be true to yourself and honor your preferences.
Maria Erving
#48. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.
Robert P. George
#49. The search for the soul mate, the perfect partner to complete you, is a bit like searching for the perfect food when you've got a giant ulcer in your stomach. No matter what you find, it will never be good enough.
Vironika Tugaleva
#50. This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#51. A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
P.G. Wodehouse
#52. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.
Donald James
#53. Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
Mahatma Gandhi
#54. William James described success as a combination of two things. An inner ideal which is followed persistently with courage and Outer achievement related to that ideal.
Jim Rohn
#55. Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.
Ayn Rand
#56. I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.
Gary Shteyngart
#57. The Ideal
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
James Fenton
#58. My ideal date would involve painful silence. My ideal date wouldn't involve me.
Sam Pink
#59. In an ideal world, the voices that teach us language teach us self-respect, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Those same voices also form in us humility and gratitude, and as those voices inform our inner voices, they also pass on wisdom.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#60. Above all things, one should maintain his self-respect, and there is but one way to do that, and that is to live in accordance with your highest ideal.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#62. In Christ we see a maturity of love that flowers in self-sacrifice and forgiveness; a maturity of power that never swerves from the ideal of service; a maturity of goodness that overcomes every temptation, and, of course, we see the ultimate victory of life over death itself.
Vincent Nichols
#63. There is no such thing as disappointment for those who continue to cherish the selflessness of which is born the noblest inner self. There is no such thing as failure for those who invest in the potentialities of the Ideal of the Soul.
Ameen Rihani
#64. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.
Corliss Lamont
#65. You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.
Samuel Alexander
#66. Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.
Vera Brittain
#67. I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
Charlotte Bronte
#68. My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit.
Grover Norquist
#69. Life is an aspiration. Its mission is to strive after perfection, which is self-realization. The ideal must not be lowered because of our weaknesses or imperfections.
Mahatma Gandhi
#70. I would define morality as enlightened self-interest ... That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.
Andrew Young
#71. I respect self-giving and I've tried to lead my life with that as the ideal. But real self-giving is when we take our being, that which is most precious to us, and we throw it into eternity with a total sense of offering.
Frederick Lenz
#72. The ideal way to live would be always to treat each day, each encounter with loved ones, as one's last. Only thus could one avoid the endless self-reproach, self-recrimination, with which so many flagellate themselves after a sudden loss.
Dorothy Simpson
