A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham
I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
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You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
Set-backs in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong...
Anarchism is in reality the ideal of political and social science, and also the ideal of religion. It is the ideal to which Jesus Christ looked forward. Christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority, but he did seek to write on the hearts of men God's law and make them self-legislating.
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.
One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up to expect certain things to happen - and they don't. Everything is set up for you to think Anna is going to die in childbirth. She dreams it's going to happen, the doctor, Vronsky and Karenin think it's going to happen, and it's what should happen to an adulteress by the rules of a nineteenth-century novel. But then it doesn't happen. It's so fascinating to be left in that space, in a kind of free fall, where you have no idea what's going to happen.
My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.
You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you've got to dream a garden.
Look, fundamentally there are two sets of questions that apply in the war against terrorism. The one set of questions deals with the, "Where is it going to happen? What's going to happen? When is it going to happen?" The other set of questions deals with, "What is it that our enemy, the terrorists, are trying to achieve?" What are they trying to induce us to do?
When you train as a dancer, you understand you have to work exceptionally hard. I think dancers are the hardest - working people in show business. You have to push your body beyond where you thought it could go. It's athleticism. Perfection doesn't exist, but with classical ballet, there is an ideal, and I got obsessed with that ideal. In some ways, it was problematic because I don't have an ideal ballet body, but the discipline is what I carry with me to this day. That's my park, the discipline of dancing.
Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.
Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.
Set your ideal as near to perfection as your imagination is capable of forming the conception.
I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.
In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who’s comfortable "putting himself out there."
In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who's comfortable 'putting himself out there.'
Next to the love between man and his Creator,
The love of one man and one woman,
Is the loftiest and the most illusive ideal,
That has been set before the world.
A perfect marriage is like a pure heart:
Those who have it are fit to see God.
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