A Quote by Victor Hugo

The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real

Victor Hugo

Quote Topics

Greater Ideal Need Real Soul Than

Quote Author

Victor Hugo
French - Novelist
February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

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

Communism seemed to be an ideal experiment in trying to achieve a state where all persons have greater democracy. I might add, like other persons here and elsewhere, I found myself concerned with the problem of increasing need for greater economic and political democracy for greater numbers of people.

Sidney Buchman

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Henri Frederic Amiel

As long as I can remember I feel I have had this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.

Bruce Lee

Herein, lies the key to love. Love builds bridges. Soul exists because God loves It. Soul equals Soul; no one Soul is greater than another. Experience the greatest love of all.

Harold Klemp

There is great danger, yea many times most danger, in the smallest sins... Greater sins do sooner startle the soul, and awaken and rouse up the soul to repentance, than lesser sins do. Little sins often slide into the soul, and breed, and work secretly and undiscernibly in the soul, till they come to be so strong, as to trample upon the soul and to cut the throat of the soul.

Thomas Brooks

That is why all great men are modest: they consistently measure themselves not in comparison to other people but to the idea of perfection ever present in their minds, an ideal infinitely clearer and greater than any common people have, and they also realize how far they are from fulfilling their ideal.

Giacomo Leopardi

There is no greater wealth than wisdom, no greater poverty than ignorance; no greater heritage than culture and no greater support than consultation.

Ali ibn Abi Talib

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.

Rick Warren

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

George Santayana

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

George Santayana

The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.

Annie Besant

To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.

Ellen Key

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Victor Hugo

We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other.