Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous
old idealist quotes, idealist sayings, and idealist proverbs, collected over the years from a variety
of sources.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.H. L. Mencken
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Among idealists and visionaries, there is no shortage of good intent, but there's often a shortage of discipline.Scott Belsky
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Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.Robert Anton Wilson
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Idealists are not the good friends of the truths; they create their own truth.Mehmet Murat ildan
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If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.Randolph Bourne
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If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.Robert Penn Warren
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To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.Warren W. Wiersbe
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Any idealist who tries to join the Peace Corps must realize he is not going to change the world overnight.Sargent Shriver
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Idealists are either blind or clowns; because they think it is possible to have a beautiful world with asshole creatures like humans.M.F. Moonzajer
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Only the broken-hearted idealist can become a cynic. Mark Clifton
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All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.Friedrich Nietzsche
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Too often people view idealists as naive.Jacqueline Novogratz
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An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.Sydney J. Harris
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The idealist and dreamer will stubbornly go down with the ship. The serial innovator grabs the rudder and changes course.Larry Osborne
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The true idealist pursues what his heart says is right in a way that his head says will work.Richard M. Nixon
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The idealist regards facts as provisional.Mason Cooley
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Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.George Carlin
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Idealist: a cynic in the making.Irving Layton
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I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.Carl Sandburg
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Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.Ralph Waldo Emerson
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An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.Henry Ford
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The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.Malcolm De Chazal
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The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.John Zorn
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Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.Alisa Dana Steinberg
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You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.John Zorn
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The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.Irving Babbitt
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The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.Friedrich Nietzsche
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An idealist who couldn't cope becomes cynical.Amy Ray
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Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.Seth Godin
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To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.Oliver Wendell Holmes
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We come to think of an idealist as one who seeks to realize what is not in fact realizable. But, it is necessary to insist, to have ideals is not the same as to have impracticable ideals, however often it may be the case that our ideals are impracticable.Susan Stebbing
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It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.Henry A. Kissinger
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It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.Bertrand Russell
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Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.Emma Goldman
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The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.Albert Camus
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True idealists are rare; they are the dedicated workers, who would, if need be, die at the stake.Henry Williamson
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Being idealistic really helps you overcome some of the many obstacles put in your path.Andy Hertzfeld