Ideal Quotes

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you, consider what you are and what you ought to be, – think of the ideal.[Pади бога, остановитесь хоть на мгновение, перестаньте работать, оглянитесь вокруг, подумайте, что вы из себя представляете и какими бы вы должны были быть, подумайте об идеале.]

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.

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 fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect, it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.[Das Schicksal einer Kulturepoche, die vom Baum der Erkenntnis gegessen hat, ist es, wissen zu müssen, daß wir den Sinn des Weltgeschehens nicht aus dem noch so sehr vervollkommneten Ergebnis seiner Durchforschung ablesen können, sondern ihn selbst zu schaffen imstande sein müssen, daß »Weltanschauungen« niemals Produkt fortschreitenden Erfahrungswissens sein können, und daß also die höchsten Ideale, die uns am mächtigsten bewegen, für alle Zeit nur im Kampf mit anderen Idealen sich auswirken, die anderen ebenso heilig sind, wie uns die unseren.]

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.[Wer Jemandes Ideal geschaut hat, ist dessen unerbittlicher Richter und gleichsam sein böses Gewissen.]