A Quote by Henri Frederic Amiel
The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
Related Quotes
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
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.
Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.
All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.
Longing for the ideal while criticizing the real is evidence of immaturity. On the other hand, settling for the real without striving for the ideal is complacency. Maturity is living with the tension.
Formerly it was the fashion to preach the natural; now it is the ideal. People too often forget that these things are profoundly compatible; that in a beautiful work of imagination the natural should be ideal, and the ideal natural.
A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Universalism as an ideal is as old as nay, is probably much more ancient than the Christian ideal.
You put the picture of the ideal person in your head and then someone comes along and they don't fit that ideal at all. But somehow there is something about them that is so attractive. Everyone that I have fallen for has not fit that ideal at all.
The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.
Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.
What is necessary is not to seek after some fantastic ideal, utterly unsuited to our real needs, but to discover the true nature of those needs, to fulfill them, and rejoice therein.
The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
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