A genius is a grown-up that did not grow up.

People are creators. But I doubt that many realize this. We are not meant to go out into the world and find flawless things, we are not meant to sit down and have flawless things...

We’ve already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one...

masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his ‘utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig...

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the...

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman – the idea of her.

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have...

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or...

To put a dreamer in their place isn’t dreaming.

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...

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea...

You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.’Risa closes her eyes. She...

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

Bravery usually looked stupid from the outside.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn’t met yet who would ask...

Because if we were all created idealists, then life was bound to be one relentless disappointment. But then, there was also music. We unlearned the lies with one hand and repeated them with the other.

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

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the...

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

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal...

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

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...

It’s always the lesser of two evils.”I don’t see why there have to be any evils at all.’-Connor

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in...

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what...

I prefer true over happy now.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Mothers do not have love affairs. Before their children they have dreams, and after their children they have delusions. If the father is involved somewhere, they have fantasies.

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,...

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

If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part...

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain...

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent…

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts...

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

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

She had dealt with her pregnancy by wrapping herself in dreams.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to...

Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought,...

Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.

You’re the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that’s all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.”She was too...

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

I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones...

I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe...

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given...

Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: “He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young...