Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
Words are and remain an empty sound, and the road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.
We should not mourn for men of high ideals. Rather we should rejoice that we had the privilege of having had them with us, to inspire us by their radiant personalities.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality.
Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
He who has seen another’s ideal becomes his inexorable judge, and as it were his evil conscience.