"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
— H.L. Mencken

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights and Other Stories)

"They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal."
— Leslie Charteris (The Last Hero)

"Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!"
— Eça de Queirós (The Mandarin and Other Stories by Eca De Queiroz)

"God save me from idealists."
— Jim Butcher (Grave Peril)

"In reality the universe has no geometry."
— Kedar Joshi (Superultramodern Science And Philosophy)

"As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance."
— Susan Neiman (Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists)

"One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them."
— Susan Neiman (Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists)

"This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them."
— Doris Lessing

"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.’"
— Gustave Flaubert (Bouvard And Pecuchet)

"It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off"
— Eric Bogosian (SubUrbia)

"The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants."
— Robert Hughes (The Shock of the New)

"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

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