Idealism Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.

(from The structure of desire and recognition) — Robert B. Brandom

Hold onto your creativity, that idealism that is rooted in some degree of innocence and a firm belief in something finer than the things we already have. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you. — Neel Mukherjee

I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history. — Simon Critchley

Philosophic concepts are a form of sentiment. Conflicts between lofty ideas and vouchsafed values are endemic for any thinking person. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There is ascension to potential that Plato couldn't conceive while prescribing idealism to conception as highest existences. With Streams, there isn't a difference between ideas and instantiations. They are both authenticated within all possibilities in Stream, within the Primal Cause as ordered. Ideas as ordered constructs in consciousness, instantiations as ordered effects.
Instantiations for instance are ordered products from ideas. Ideas are ordered constructs in consciousness. And in authentication, they are the same as external effects. — Dew Platt

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one. — Robert C. Tucker

I shall not be alive a half decade hence," said Seldon, "and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, 'man. — Isaac Asimov

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them. — Susan Neiman

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich philosophy of idealism propounds. — Oswald Spengler

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

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one. — Morris Raphael Cohen

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it. — Frederick C. Beiser

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

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

Efficiency, of course, is futile ... It has no philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient ... A man who thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but idealism. — G.K. Chesterton

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today. — Ayn Rand

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. — M. Fethullah Gulen