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• Ideal:   A conception of something in its absolute perfection.  2.  A standard of perfection or excellence. 3. An ultimate object of endeavor; a goal.  3.  An honorable or worthy principle or aim.  Oxford Dictionary
• Ideal: Conforming exactly to an ideal, law, or standard. Merriam Webster
• Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. Walter Lippman
• Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be. Don Quixote
• Principles,  Values,  Vision,  Morality and ethics,  Intention,  Clarity

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Ideals are not reachable, but they motivate us to reach higher…

• We never reach our ideals, whether of mental or moral improvement, but the thought of them shows us our deficiencies, and spurs us on to higher and better things. Tryon Edwards
• The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Michelangelo
• We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal. Friedrich Nietzsche
• A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice. Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest. Margaret Fuller
• Motivation

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… and guide us like the stars

• Our ideals resemble the stars, which illuminate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal. Carl Shurz
• Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them. Carl Schurz
• Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. Louisa May Alcott
• The optimalism ideal is not a distant shore to be reached but a distant star that guides us and can never be reached. As Carl Rogers pointed out, ‘The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.’ Tal Ben- Shahar
• Stars

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Ideals have great force and power

• Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal. Israel Zangwill
• There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal. Calvin Coolidge
• An ideal is the only thing that has any real force. We have lost sight of our own ideal and its tremendous force and vigor. Somehow that must be recaptured. It must be passed on to generations to come, to make them believe in it; so that the energy in man which has its source in the ideal will not be lost. Homer Ferguson
• An ideal is the most practical thing in the world, for it is a force behind action that must be reckoned with by the frankest materialist. Edward H. Griggs
• Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day affairs of life… the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.  Theodore Roosevelt
• Power

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Ideals feed the soul

• The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.  Victor Hugo
• He who does not believe has no soul. He is empty. He has no ideals. He has nothing to live for. He has no sunshine, no light. No joy in life. He is a poor, poor man. Robert Ley
• All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them. Thomas Carlyle
• We see facts with our eyes; we see ideas with our minds; we see ideals with our souls. Whatever we see with our souls is real and permanent and cannot be destroyed. Glenn Clark
• The soul

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Ideals generate enthusiasm and energy…

• Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.  Arnold Toynbee
• Be anchored to some ideal, philosophy or cause that keeps you too excited to sleep. Brian Koslow
• The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal. Aleister Crowley
• Enthusiasm,  Energy management

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… motivating noble actions and enriching life

• Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.  Emma Goldman
• We are born predestined idealists, for we are born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.  Oliver Wendell Holmes
• It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.  Robert F. Kennedy
• The best and noblest lives are those which are set toward high ideals. René Alemeras
• Right action

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Ideals create meaning in life, especially during storms and drudgery

• When you stop having dreams and ideals — well, you might as well stop altogether. Marian Anderson
• To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him. Honore De Balzac
• All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. Theodore E. Parker
• Don’t part company with your ideals. They are anchors in a storm. Arnold Glasgow

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Ideals bring strength

• Heads are wisest when they are cool and hearts are strongest when they beat in response to noble ideals. Ralph Johnson Bunche
• Strength

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Ideals help us stay young

• You don’t get old from living a particular number of years: you get old because you have deserted your ideals.  Years wrinkle your skin, renouncing your ideals wrinkles your soul.  Worry, doubt, fear, and despair are the enemies which slowly bring us down to the ground and turn us to dust before we die.  Douglas MacArthur
• Youth,  Staying young at heart

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Ideals bring happiness

• Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination. Immanuel Kant
• Man is the creator of his own happiness. It is the aroma of life, lived in harmony with high ideals. For what a man has he may be dependent upon others; what he is rests with him alone. David O. McKay
• To be happy, engage only in that which accords with your highest ideals. Philip Arnold
• The more your behavior in the moment is consistent with what you feel your ideal behavior should be, the more you like and respect yourself and the happier you are. Brian Tracy
• Happiness

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Ideals, and living by them, creates character

• Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
• A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them. Herbert Read
• He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. Walter Lippmann
• Character

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Where there are no ideals, there is often darkness

• When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can’t live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed. Judith Martin
• You always need to make ideals clear to yourself. You always have to be aware of them, even if there is no direct path to their realization. Were there no ideals, there would be no hope whatsoever. Then everything would be hopelessness, darkness–a blind alley. Andrei Sakharov
• Darkness

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Ideals are only worthwhile if they contribute to growth and happiness

• All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purpose of the growth and happiness of the individual. Eric Fromm
• All higher motives, ideals, conceptions, sentiments in a man are of no account if they do not come forward to strengthen him for the better discharge of the duties which devolve upon him in the ordinary affairs of life. Henry Ward Beecher
• Growth,  Happiness

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Ideals must be practical and married to reality …

• Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground. Theodore Roosevelt
• 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
• It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit, divorced from it, they remain barren. Bertrand Russell
• You cannot seek for the ideal outside the realm of reality. Leon Blum
• What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real. F. Hedge
• Reality does not conform to the ideal but confirms it. Gustave Flaubert
• The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it. James Russell Lowell
• Reality

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… or they lose their effectiveness

• Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. John Galsworthy
• Idealism is fine; but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive.
• Effectiveness

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Create your ideals using the power of your imagination

• Set your ideal as near to perfection as your imagination is capable of forming the conception. Wallace D. Wattles
• When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one’s imagination. Ellen
• Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. Walter Lippmann
• Imagination

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Use role models as your ideal of what you’d like to be

• Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is and what kind of man you long to be. Thomas Carlyle

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Fix upon your ideal of what you wish your future to look like

• All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose. Brian Tracy

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Cherish your ideals and be passionate about them

• Cherish your vision; cherish your ideals, cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, if you remain true to them, your world will at last be built. James Allen
• By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it. Nikos Kazantzakis
• Be anchored to some ideal, philosophy or cause that keeps you too excited to sleep. Brian Koslow
• Passion

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Allow your ideals to change as you evolve

• I recognize that even you, yourself, will change. Your ideals will change, your tastes will change, your desires will change. Your whole understandings of who you are had better change, because if it doesn’t change, you’ve become a very static personality over a great many years, and nothing would displease me more. And so I recognize that the process of evolution will produce changes in you. Neale Donald Walsch
• Change,  Evolution

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Have ideals in your relationships …

• In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends. James Ishmael Ford
• The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two. Anne Sophie Swetchine
• Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness. George Sand
• Principles for healthy relationships

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… but never idealise others

• Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Leo Buscaglia

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Put the foundation of action under your ideals

• If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau
• To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world — that I am able to change it in positive ways.  Maxine Hong Kingston
• Action

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Fix upon your ideal of who you want to be and act accordingly…

• Fix upon your ideal of what you wish to make yourself. Wallace D. Wattles
• What ignited the process wasn’t any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world. Daniel Coyle
• We lift ourselves by our thought. We climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere. Orison Swett Marden
• We all have an image of our ideal self, an elaborate construct of the kind of person we would like to be. While it is not always possible to feel as this constructed self would (fearless and compassionate at all times, for example), we can act in accordance with its ideals (courageous, generous, and so on). Active acceptance is about recognizing things as they are and then choosing the course of action we deem appropriate and worthy of ourselves. It is about recognizing that at every moment in our life we have a choice—to be afraid and yet to act courageously, to feel jealous and yet to act benevolently, to accept being human and act with humanity. Tal Ben- Shahar
• First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Epictetus
• Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.  James Allen
• Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be. Henry David Thoreau
• Our ideals are our better selves. Amos Bronson Alcott
• Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others.  Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level.  Alexander Haig
• We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts. Harold Nicolson
• What is your ideal self? What does it mean to be your highest self?
• What would the ideal you do right now?
• Envision the person you want to become

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… but make sure the ideal is based on who you really are at heart

• We can’t become anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.  If we are born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter. If we are born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother.   Steven Pressfield
• In my ideal life, I am … If there’s something on the list that I am not, I must ask myself if it’s really me. And if it is, I must ask myself why I’m not manifesting it. When I see what’s standing in my way, I can move beyond it. Jan Denise

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Let your ideals rouse you to great effort

• Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth. Swami Vivekananda
• To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle. Sir William Osler
• Man must cast out of himself everything which separates him from God. He must will to live the divine life, and he must rise above all moral temptations; he must forsake every course of action that is not in accord with his highest ideals. Wallace D. Wattles
• Effort

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Remember that ideals should never be about lip service

• The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal. Albert Einstein
• Words without actions are the assassins of idealism. Herbert Hoover

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Have a definite, clear practical ideal and create plans to realise it

• Most of us serve our ideals by fits and starts. The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication. Cecil B. De Mille
• Determine the thing that can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way. Abraham Lincoln
• Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.  Arnold Toynbee
• 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. Aristotle
• Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. Earl Nightingale
• Planning

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Here are some worthy ideals to aspire to

• It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service. Albert Einstein
• Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than the freedom to stagnate. Adlai E. Stevenson
• The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavor — property, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible. Albert Einstein

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Thoughts on what the ideal life looks like

• Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain
• Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness. George Sand
• The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing – where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do. Phillip Brooks
• The ideal life is to do everything a little and one thing a lot. Martha Lupton

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Thoughts on the ideal way to live

• To live and let live, without clamour for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine love; to write truth first on the table of one’s own heart–this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal. Mary Baker Eddy
• The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of the circumstances. Aristotle

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There are those who are more cynical about the true value of ideals

• Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. John Galsworthy
• Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. David T. Wolf
• An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. Henry L. Mencken
• The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals. Sydney J. Harris
• Misguided idealism is as unproductive as unconcern. Dodds Kinard
• When a man forgets his ideals, he may hope for happiness, but not till then. John Oliver Hobbes
• It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals. Bertrand Russell
• I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress. Ray Dalio
• At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. Aldous Huxley
• Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. George Bernard Shaw
• An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness. Nicolas Gomez Davila

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Realise that ideals are within you, not without

• As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found–in himself. Erich Fromm
• Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it. Louis Pasteur

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Do not make perfection into an ideal

• Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. Ann Lamont

Ideals and today’s society

• No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. Alfred North Whitehead
• You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. Norman Douglas

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Politics and ideals

• Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. Aldous Huxley
• Ideals are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism. Bill Moyers
• There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal. Calvin Coolidge
• Politics

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Idealism and skepticism

• Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist. George Carlin
• 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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• Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on. Edgar Watson Howe
• I see you’re a man with ideals; I guess I better be going while you’ve still got them. Mae West

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