Quotes About Idealism Vs. Realism

#1. America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.

Michael Ignatieff

#2. Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.

Claude McKay

#3. Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

G.K. Chesterton

#4. By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void.

Oscar Wilde

#5. I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

Criss Jami

#6. I didn't think I'd end up divorced with three kids and a bucket fanny, but there you go.

Robert Bryndza

#7. What I've learned is that life is a balance between idealism and realism.

Peter Hook

#8. There is no realism without an element of idealism.

Henry A. Kissinger

#9. Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#10. The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

Timothy Keller

#11. Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.

Richard M. Nixon

#12. Sometimes it's best to trade an ideal for something more practical that you can guarantee.

A.J. Darkholme

#13. I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

William Hague

#14. The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders
are made rather than born.

Warren G. Bennis

#15. Mix idealism with realism and add hard work. This will often bring much more than you could ever hope for.

John Wooden

#16. It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#17. There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.

Honore De Balzac

#18. [I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.

Andrew Solomon

#19. I'm going to kill you."
"Babe, calm down," Vaughan whispered in my ear.
"Let me go."
"Don't think that's a good idea. You wanted to stay out of jail, remember?"
"I want to kill him more," I panted. "Much, much more.

Kylie Scott

#20. The romantic idealism of my youth has been replaced with realism and hard work at what I love.

Monique Roffey

#21. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side.

Sitting Bull

#22. Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

M.F. Moonzajer

#23. Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection

John Powell

#24. Selling records is fantastic. But if you're not loving what you do, and if everybody is throwing knives at you, it can get old very fast.

Wes Borland

#25. Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

Henri Bergson

#26. Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

Lin Yutang

#27. All an investor can do is follow a consistently disciplined and rigorous approach; over time the returns will come

Seth Klarman

#28. Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

Mary Parker Follett