Idealized Quotes & Sayings

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness. As dusk approaches in the hinterlands, a traveler ponders shelter for the night. He notices tall rushes growing everywhere, so he bundles an armful together as they stand in the field, and knots them at the top. Presto, a living grass hut. The next morning, before embarking on another day's journey, he unknots the rushes and presto, the hut de-constructs, disappears, and becomes a virtually indistinguishable part of the larger field of rushes once again. The original wilderness seems to be restored, but minute traces of the shelter remain. A slight twist or bend in a reed here and there. There is also the memory of the hut in the mind of the traveler - and in the mind of the reader reading this description. Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness. — Leonard Koren

The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings. — Bell Hooks

To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That's a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you've played a lot of idealized characters. So when you've got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that's interesting. — Annette Bening

Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was already a poetic achievement; a philosopher's life was an enactment of his philosophy; and when they were a part of life that way, instead of ignoring each other, philosophy could nourish poetry, poetry express philosophy, and together achieve an admirable persuasiveness. Today beauty no longer acts; and action no longer bothers about being beautiful; and wisdom operates on the sidelines. — Andre Gide

A trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. — William Gibson

Those who suffer from an exaggerated sense of their own ability and accomplishment are continually subject to frustration, disappointment, and rage when reality intrudes and the world doesn't validate their idealized view of themselves. — Dalai Lama

For women ... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique. — Gloria Steinem

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character ... tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game. — Northrop Frye

When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device. — Stephen Jay Gould

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and — Herman Wouk

Twenty-fours hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, and idealized representation of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere. — Kurt Vonnegut

For me there's several components to picture-taking and it starts with my goals as an artist. It's capturing I guess the inner life of my subject and then it is giving them their idealized version of themselves. — Carol Friedman

Because I don't think it's very healthy to hold people to idealized views. I think that's a certain stage in life, something kids do. You have to go through that idealistic phase with your parents, but at a certain point, you need to see people as just people. — Joan Cusack

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives. — William A. Dembski

The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering ... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection. — Robert J. Sawyer

Clouds in Fillory weren't clammy and disappointing the way they were in the real world, they brushed past you all warm and soft and cottony, just solid enough to be comforting. Fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck children, fuck fucking itself: this was his romance, this fantasy land at whose helm he sat, steering it on and on into the future, world without end, until he died and tastefully idealized statues were made of him. — Lev Grossman

I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched. — Adrian Tomine

If someone tells you that pleasure is wrong and tolerance is weakness, and that you must follow this or that dogma blindly in obedience, and if you are told this is that only right road toward the idealized good, then most likely you are dealing with a fanatic. If you are told to kill for the sake of peace, you are dealing with someone who does not understand peace or justice. If you are told to give up your free will, you are dealing with a fanatic! — Seth

Borderline parents with an insecure sense of self may use jewelry, clothes, and other trappings as proof of their attainment of the idealized happy family, regardless of their means. Rather than unconditional love, nurturance, and open communication, the emphasis may have been on how things appeared to outsiders. Thus the need for expensive cars, respectable jobs, obedient children, well-groomed pets, a carefully landscaped yard.
The — Kimberlee Roth

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy. — Bill Moyers

Painting can also be too earnest at times and that's a drag. You don't want to go in that direction either. It should be holistic. It should represent the whole of your personality, I guess, so if somebody is a sincere painter or an ironic painter, then they're just bullshitting the audience and presenting only an idealized version of themselves. — Joe Bradley

The image of life forces diluted and diseased by contact with the intruders revealed a telling insecurity. How confident were these men in the power of their idealized country or in themselves as its protectors? Where was the tradition of resilience and absorbing strength that their florid rhetoric celebrated at other times? In the very metaphor of infection, the nativists uncovered their fears that "America" was but a fragile essence. Like latter-day "defenders" who saw other alien dangers in communism, they attributed enormous influence to the enemy. Their angry words betrayed the desperation of those who half fear the battle is already lost. — David H. Bennett

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The wild is where you find it, not in some distant world relegated to a nostalgic past or an idealized future; its presence is not black or white, bad or good, corrupted or innocent... We are of that nature, not apart from it. We survive because of it, not instead of it. — Renee Askins

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener. — Raymond Scott

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people. — James Surowiecki

I used to get people criticizing me for drawing so many women with gorgeous idealized bodies, but I pointed out that I draw a lot of men with muscular bodies, washboard abs, and enormous wangs, and they never got criticized. So those criticisms have stopped. — Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. — James Hillman

In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to somehow stand in for all the things I didn't have in life that were thought to make us human, all the absent music and touch and sympathy; in my mind she lived a separate life apart from her real one, and there she grew more pure and perfect with each passing day . . . In my mind Miranda had become a miracle. — Dexter Palmer

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona. — Richard Rohr

Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior. — Tony Campolo

Fantasy is like an idealized reality, and the core of fantasy is the one person can make a difference. — R.A. Salvatore

As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of "sex" to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream - it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it's still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice. — Emily Gould

If there's a supernatural agent that is working in the natural world, then the idealized conditions described by the law are no longer in effect. The law isn't violated because the law has this implicit provision that nothing is messing around with the conditions. — William Lane Craig

Fashion models and financial models are similar. They bear a similar relationship to everyday world. Like supermodels, financial models are idealized representations of the real world, they are not real, they don't quite work the way that the real world works. There is celebrity in both worlds. In the end, there is the same inevitable disappointment - Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns & Money — Satyajit Das

yoga is not a practice of attaining idealized physical postures, but a process of self-exploration, self-acceptance, and self-transformation. Reinforce — Mark Stephens

In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar. — Will Schwalbe

Sometimes we control our family members because we idolize and idealize our perfect plan over the journey that God has laid out for them. (p. 56) — Mary E. DeMuth

Leading man seems to quite often be an idealized figure. — James McAvoy

A branch of electrical theory called network theory deals with the electrical properties of electrical circuits, or networks, made by interconnecting three sorts of idealized electrical structures: — John Robinson Pierce

God is man idealized. — Amiri Baraka

A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they're lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers. — Ann Coulter

I understood that the attachment to myself and my image ... was actually taking me away from my self, away from this wonderful opportunity to just sit, just breathe, just feel the warm animal of my body, just feel the soft, sultry heat of June. The density of my attachment was making it impossible for me to have a truly satisfying experience of life in my body just as it was in the moment. When under the sway of this obsession, my mind's attention was always in the fantasized future, or the idealized or devalued past - never present to the reality of the moment. — Stephen Cope

As the idealized mother, I might choose Irene Dunne as the mother in 'I Remember Mama' who strives and not just cooks and scrubs for her children, but who also acts as her daughter's literary agent. — Richard Corliss

Ryan Chase was my eighth-grade collage, aspirational and wide-eyed. But Max was the first bite of grilled cheese on a snowy day, the easy fit of my favorite jeans, that one old song that made it onto every playlist. Peanut-butter Girl Scout cookies instead of an ornate cake. Not glamorous or idealized or complicated. Just me. — Emery Lord

If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself. — Timothy Keller

There was Annabelle, with her honey-streaked hair curled into shining upswept ringlets, her complexion as fresh as that of the idealized dairymaids who were painted on tins of sweets. Upon first acquaintance, Annabelle's exquisite English-rose beauty had been so intimidating that Evie had been afraid to talk to her, certain that she would receive a crushing snub from such an exquisite creature. However, she had eventually discovered that Annabelle was warm and kind, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. — Lisa Kleypas

Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic. — Virginia Postrel

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home. — Victoria Secunda

Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise. — Joshua Ferris

Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I've made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel. — Sondre Lerche

I had danced when I was younger, until I was about 12, and I always idealized it, as most young girls do, as the most beautiful art. It's an expression without words. — Natalie Portman

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. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don't feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind. — Ben Gibbard

Love at a distance may be poignant; it is also idealized. Contact, more than separation, is the test of attachment. — Ilka Chase

For my parents' generation, the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love; it was a partnership. It's about creating family; it's about creating offspring. Indian culture is essentially much more of a 'we' culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate. — Aasif Mandvi

The Song of Songs, the book of Ruth, and the cycle of stories associated with King David demonstrate that biblical perspectives on sexual desire and family ties remain much more complicated than is often thought. The appropriate expression of desire is not limited to marriage between a man and a woman, but can include the love of a son of a king for his charismatic ally, the love of rabbis and theologians for God, their "husband," and the love of a faithful Moabite for her Israelite mother-in-law. The nuclear family is also not idealized: Naomi, Ruth, and Obed are a family, bound together by their common love for one another, and, in the Song of Songs, the woman's mother supports her daughter's premarital encounters over the objections of her sons, who seek to control their sister's sexuality and are overruled. King David never even bothers to pursue marriage as commonly envisioned today. His — Jennifer Wright Knust

The '60s may be idealized in the movie from a cultural point of view, but the decade was all about discord and a big generational split that was very painful. — Jane Fonda

Because women are such potent ingredients of men's imaginations, we see how much power men feel women have over them, and how women must be suppressed, defanged, or idealized in one way or another. How, with Eve, they are often thought to be the root of the evil in the world -which says more about the man or men who wrote that story than about Eve herself. Eve is curious and wants knowledge, not power over others. [...] Both onstage and offstage, women have two levels of understanding concerning how to behave -one, to behave the way men want them to behave and forget that what they want might be different; two, to find out how they really feel and decide whether or not they are going to act on it! — Tina Packer

Women create an idealized, hopeful vision for the future to inspire other women. Fiction and fantasy are the crucial first steps to changing the world. — Maya Rodale

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

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present. — Roger Lowenstein

We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which father knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails. — Anne Taylor Fleming

If you are in a big city or on an online dating site, you are flooded with options. Seeing all these options, like the people in the job example, are we now comparing our potential partners not to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person whom no one could measure up to? — Aziz Ansari

In order to change, however, you have to be willing to acknowledge the need for change - in other words, you have to come to terms with the fact that everything in your life isn't perfect. There is this concept - among not just Scientologists, but everyone - that we are all supposed to have it together. Whether it's our work, love lives, family relationships, or even feelings about ourselves, we need to present this idealized image to others. We are so conditioned when asked "How are you?" to say "Good" or "Great." But why not "I don't know. I hate everyone today." Why are we so scared to be judged imperfect or to talk about how we really feel? To be authentic? If we can just tell each other how and what we are really doing, step outside of what we believe others think we should be, the result can be therapeutic. — Leah Remini

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. — William Gibson

They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life - the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. - — T. J. Stiles

Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a sexual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a hello, an acknowledgement that the assembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived! — Ryan Boudinot

And, in this staunch little portrait, it's hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There's not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It's not idealized or humanized. It's very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There's no moral or story. There's no resolution. There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later. — Donna Tartt

Clinging to an idealized past was a poison of sorts, that bastard Nostalgia, making people think there was a better time and place if they could just get back to it. — Hugh Howey

Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative. — Robert D. Kaplan

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything. — John B. S. Haldane

To say it for those who know how to explain a thing: women have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward. Women are often privately amazed at the great honor men pay to their hearts. When men look especially for a profound, warm-hearted being, in choosing their spouse, and women for a clever, alert, and brilliant being, one sees very clearly how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman--that is, not for a complement, but for the perfection of their own merits. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves, or an idealized version of our mess of a world, and so we offer to him a version of our best selves. With our Sunday school shoes on, we sing songs about kings and drummers at his birth, perhaps so we can escape the Herod in ourselves and in the world around us. But we've lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets. — Paul Krugman

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Women's evolution unfolded through stages in the last 100 years. The first stage was "Wonder Woman," an idealized figure who functioned like — Sylvia Becker-Hill

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials. — Dan Savage

God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others. — Anais Nin

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off - though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be - but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and being to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories. — Donna Tartt

But rather than relying on a thin, idealized hope that we will all one day just get along, we can approach conflict resolution as an art form that we are privileged to develop and hone. — Diane Musho Hamilton

I have this idealized version of myself in my head that is content and doing what she loves and is comfortable and sometimes I get caught up in her life that it's almost impossible to realize that she isn't real yet. But I hope to be her someday. — Unknown

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness. — Erica Jong

A vast canvass had been stretched across the back of [the stage] and painted to look like an idealized vision of Golden Square stretching off into a hazy distance. Before it, model town houses had been erected to perfect the illusion. It tricked the eye very well until a bloody, slashed-up man vaulted over the parapets and rolled to the ground in the deep upstage. He looked like a giant, thirty feet tall, fee-fie-fo-fumming around Golden Square and bleeding on the bowling green, which was most inexplicable, until a moment later, the very fabric of the universe was rent open, for a blade of watered steel had been shoved through the taught canvas upstage and slashed across it in a great arc, tearing the heavens asunder. Through the gap leapt Jack Shaftoe, and then giants dueled in Golden Square. — Neal Stephenson

My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. — Edward Kennedy

Whenever you see shrinks on television, they're so clearly written by patients. They're either idealized or they're demonized or they love their patients. All they ever think about is their patients. — Amy Bloom

This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. ... In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it's an idealized order I'm imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like. — Stephen Shore

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time. — Chuck Klosterman

Law and society turns this conventional view on its head. "Real law" is law as it is lived in society, and the abstract ideal is itself a human artifact. Many interesting questions follow. How does real law actually operate? How are law and everyday life intertwined? Where does law as abstraction come from, and what purposes does it serve? What can we learn from the disparity between abstract law and real law? And, why is the idealized version of law so resilient even in the face of extensive contrary experience? — Kitty Calavita

I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent. — Lucy Corin

There's a thing that creeps into this conversation ... that if you complain about the depiction of women [in comics], it becomes, 'Well, but ladies - the dudes are idealized too.' And the thing is that the dudes are idealized for strength and the women are idealized for sexual availability. It's very, very different. The women's costumes are cut in such a way that I could give a cervical exam to 90% of our heroines. And I don't have a medical degree! So if I can find it, that's impressive. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

The idea that love is something magical, almost supernatural, in your heart, that has nothing to do with the day-to-day encounters with a real person
that understanding of love has probably created more unhappiness and ruined more marriages than just about anything.
Love is what happens between people living their lives together, becoming close through contact and actual partnership and it's what survives through difficulties and imperfections. An idealized, imagined, faraway person in your heart
that's not love. That's a daydream. — Misha Glouberman

Where rejection is present with neurotic anxiety, we found a certain constellation always present: The rejection was never accepted as an objective fact, but was held in juxtaposition with idealized expectations about the parent. The young woman was unable to appraise the parent realistically, but always confused the reality situation with expectations of what the parent should have been or might yet become. — Rollo May

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed. — Frank Herbert

From my parent's generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It's about creating family. It's about creating offspring. — Aasif Mandvi

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But — Andrew Klavan

What we call disorder or chaos might actually be order, if order is seen as a random distribution and not as a static, idealized condition. — William Lanouette

Longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings. — Stephen Cope

There is one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and higher inspiration than they ever before have known. — Gene Stratton-Porter