“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.”

“Now you, as a young person, may have no faith in your country, or in your church, or in your family. But you can still have faith in an ideal. If you have an ideal in front of you, you will never get lost on the journey of life. It is, after all, the journey that matters.”

“You are a living mockery of your own ideals. If not, you have set your ideals too low.”

“E. Tory Higgins (1987) suggests that self-knowledge encompasses three major domains: the actual self, the ideal self, and the ought self. The actual self consists of your representation of the attributes that someone (yourself or another) believes that you actually possess. The ideal self consists of your representation of the attributes that someone (yourself or another) would like you, ideally, to possess = that is a representation of hopes, aspirations, or wishes. The ought self consists of your representation of the attributes that someone believes you should or ought to possess - that is, a representation of duties, obligations or responsibilities. Discrepancies between the actual/own self and ideal selves lead to experiences of dejection-related emotions, such as sadness, disappointment and shame.”

“Growing up means learning what life is. When you're little, you have a set of ideals, standards, criteria, plans, outlooks, and you think that you have to sit around and wait for them to happen to you and then life will work. But life isn't like that, for anybody; you can't fall in love with a standard, you have to fall in love with a person. You can't live in a criteria, you have to live your life. You can't wait for your plans to materialize, because they may never materialize the way you think they will. You can't wait to watch your ideals and standards walk up to you, because you can't know what's yours until you have it. I always say, always take the first chance in case you never get a second one, but growing up takes that even one step further, growing up means that you have to hold on to what you have, when you have it, because what you have- that's yours- and all the ideals and criteria you have set in your head, those aren't yours, because those haven't happened to you.”

“Teachers can be a living example to their students. Not that teachers should look for students to idealize them. One who is worth idealizing does not care whether others idealize them or not. Everyone needs to see that you not only teach human values but you live them. It is unavoidable sometimes you will be idealized -- it is better for children to have a role model, or goal, because then the worshipful quality in them can dawn.”