69 Inspiring Idealism Quotes

Idealism often inspires us to strive for a better world, driving forward momentum and change. It's the vision of what could be rather than what is, the belief that dreams can be transformed into reality through perseverance and passion. In exploring the most compelling thoughts from philosophers, leaders, and visionaries, we can uncover the wisdom and motivation needed to fuel our own aspirations. Delve into this curated collection of 69 inspiring idealism quotes to ignite your spirit and encourage you to dream bigger, think broader, and pursue with unwavering commitment. These words not only resonate with the purity of high ideals but also serve as a guiding light in times of doubt, reminding us that the power to transform begins with the courage to imagine.

1. “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

2. “I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?” - Kenneth Cain

3. “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

4. “The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.” - George Carlin

6. “For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

7. “The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.” - W. Somerset Maugham

8. “Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one” - John Lennon

9. “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 instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.” - Evelyn Underhill

10. “In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.” - Gustave Flaubert

11. “Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!” - Eca De Queiroz

12. “In attaining our ideals,our means should be as pure as the end!” - Rajendra Prasad.

13. “In reality the universe has no geometry.” - Kedar Joshi

14. “If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.” - John Nichols

15. “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 Dana Steinberg

16. “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 of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.” - William James

17. “Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.” - Adolf Hitler

18. “Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.” - Peter Senge

19. “As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.” - Susan Neiman

20. “This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.” - Doris Lessing

21. “God save me from idealists.” - Jim Butcher

22. “Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.” - Ayn Rand

23. “Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.” - Ayn Rand

24. “And did those feet in ancient timeWalk upon England's mountains green?And was the holy Lamb of GodOn England's pleasant pastures seen?And did the Countenance DivineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was Jerusalem builded here,Among these dark Satanic Mills?Bring me my Bow of burning gold:Bring me my Arrows of desire:Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!Bring me my Chariot of fire!I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,Till we have built JerusalemIn England's green & pleasant Land.” - William Blake

25. “Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.” - Jonathan Franzen

26. “Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

27. “Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world—that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, —which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,—that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

28. “History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.” - Arthur Koestler

29. “There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.” - Neil Gaiman

30. “The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.” - Bauvard

31. “a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.” - Frank O'Connor

32. “Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.” - tan malaka

33. “Saya akan lebih mendulukan kebenaran-kebenaran universal, bukan hutang budi, bukan kewajiban moral dan bukan juga pengabdian buta.” - Putu Wijaya

34. “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.” - Nikolai Grozni

35. “...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” - Calvin Coolidge

36. “That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.” - Charles Dickens

37. “At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.” - Anais Nin

38. “He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun].” - Iain Pears

39. “I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.” - Toba Beta

40. “You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.” - Jon Stewart

41. “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 a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

42. “But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda.” - James Jones

43. “Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he (Jefferson) tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and the worldly imperfections as the world's problems rather than his own.” - Joseph Ellis

44. “When that time come, nobody will care for each other.You don't have to prove me wrong, you'll need that energy.” - Toba Beta

45. “To try to reform all the power structures at once would leave us with no power structure to use in our project. In any case, we will be able to see that absolute moral renewal could be attempted only by an absolute power and that a tyrannous force such as this must destroy the whole moral life of man, not renew it.” - Michael Polanyi

46. “Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.” - Todd Garlington

47. “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” - Terry Pratchett

48. “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 man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.” - G.K. Chesterton

49. “The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.” - Romeo Dallaire

50. “Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.” - Harold Edmund Stearns

51. “Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

52. “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 to other parts.” - Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

53. “A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial; free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection; and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future.” - Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

54. “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 of these numerous friends of humanity, and he's ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge—like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

55. “Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.” - Ludwig Feuerbach

56. “I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.” - Bauvard

57. “How many times in life have I been advised to "toe the line," to "tone it down," to stop "pushing the envelope"? As a journalist, I had to keep my opinions to myself for 30 years. I thought that, as an artist, I'd have the liberty to express my views. Now I'm told that doing so might hurt my readership. I'm so idealistic, as I said elsewhere on FB today, that I think people ought to read my books because they're good. Period.” - Sherry Jones

58. “Idealismul și violența sunt două fețe inseparabile ale legionarismului, ceea ce pare derutant, unii continuând și astăzi să vadă doar „puritatea” proiectului, iar alții, dimpotrivă, strict dezlănțuirea criminală.” - Lucian Boia

59. “Cum au putut atâtea spirite alese să fie atrase de o mișcare criminală e o întrebare nelalocul ei. „Spiritele alese” au fost atrase de idealismul mișcării, idealism care, în exces, a condus pe de altă parte la o barbarie fără margini.” - Lucian Boia

60. “Călătoria pare să fie destul de lungă. Tânărul pare să se fi îmbarcat în trenul lui Auguste Compte, să fi trecut prin stația teologiei, a cărei deviză era: „Da! Crede și nu cerceta” pentru a poposi și a scormoni acum în tărâmurile metafizicii a cărei deviză este: „Nu!”, iar în depărtare se întrezărește realismul, pe al cărui frontispiciu stă scris: „Deschide ochii și întdrăznește!”.” - Naguib Mahfouz

61. “S'il n'y avait que des salauds dans le monde, le Réalisme serait aussi le Bon Sens, car le Réalisme est précisément le bon sens des salauds.” - Georges Bernanos

62. “The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.” - Timothy Keller

63. “If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be short lived, and you may feel that you are never good enough.The continued hope for the impossible, the expectation that you will or can be unconditionally loved and adored, is not facing reality but rather holding onto an idealized image of yourself and an idealized version of what others can provide. If this is the case, your sense of self may be threatened by shame and its resulting depression, or by feelings of inadequacy for not living up to your unrealistic ideals. A better understanding of shame may help you recognize your tendency to hide what you feel from yourself and others.” - Mary C. Lamia

64. “It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?' (Berkeley, 1710: 25)” - George Berkeley

65. “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 system could be reformed.” - CrimethInc.

66. “Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: "He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.” - Doris Kearns Goodwin

67. “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” - Edith Wharton

68. “The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.” - Bryant McGill

69. “It isn't a circle--it is simply a long line--as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end--we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes--who dream, who will not give up--are called idealists...and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"!” - Lorraine Hansberry