Top 57 Idealize Quotes & Sayings

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

If you don't remember childhood and you idealize it, you can't write books for kids because they're not real. Kids pick that up.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.

While followers idealize the real, leaders realize the ideal... They outshine with their power of love those whose only motivation is love of power.

I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.

At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You're trying to make them laugh. They can't laugh at someone they're looking up to.

People idealize or reminisce about their 20s, but nobody tells you beforehand that it's hard and unglamorous and often very unpleasant.

We tend to idealize tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nut cases.

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values. Technology can help cure diseases, but we can prevent a lot of diseases by old-fashioned changes in behavior.

It's easy to idealize someone that you don't know.

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

We sometimes idealize the early church and want our churches to go back to the simple, old ways. We need to carefully read the history. Harmony takes work.

Men as yet need some help to their imagination. There remains still room for a little illusion. It is better for men, it is better for women, that each somewhat idealize the other. Much is lost when life has lost its atmosphere, and is reduced to naked fact.

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.

A lot of directors idealize their leading ladies or turn them into these objects of sexuality and beauty.

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

Character halts without aid of the imagination, which our classes in Shakespeare and Browning, music and drawing, recognize not only as amusement and by-play of the mind, but a co-ordinate power. Its work is unhappily styled fiction; for to idealize is to realize.

We still want to idealize moms, and sometimes we want to idealize actresses who are moms, too. I know that's something I've experienced, but we're all just doing the best we can and we're all trying to raise our kids and talk to them about everything that needs to be discussed.

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.

What is protecting me is that it is not a finality being an actress. I really think we tend to idealize this job a lot. When you're an actress and you're really famous, it means people believe you are on top of the world - and I think that's not true.

With the royal family, you don't want to see them as people because it takes the sheen off. They're distant; you can idealize them. But there's room to have compassion for people and see them as human beings. Just because they're royalty, it doesn't mean they don't love or feel loss or feel pain.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

Teachers can be a living example to their students. Not that teachers should look for students to idealize them. One who is worth idealizing does not care whether others idealize them or not. Everyone needs to see that you not only teach human values but you live them. It is unavoidable sometimes you will be idealized -- it is better for children to have a role model, or goal, because then the worshipful quality in them can dawn.

Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.

With the royal family, you don't want to see them as people because it takes the sheen off. They're distant, you can idealize them. But there's room to have compassion for people and see them as human beings. Just because they're royalty, it doesn't mean they don't love, or feel loss, or feel pain.

I try to be as optimistic as I can. I feel like that's the beautiful thing about art and music. It can take you places, and they can be a positive influence. A very soothing influence. Honestly, I feel like there's enough pain and terrible things that happen in life. That's beautiful thing in art, you can really idealize things.

Women in figure skating, like in every other industry, are expected to conform to an unrealistic standard of beauty. Unhealthy habits are often encouraged to promote a thin frame, and young girls idealize a skewed definition of 'fit.'

Beware of organizations that proclaim their devotion to the light without embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they must devalue the rest.

We idealize the transformative life into a life of power, of extraordinary experience, of deep realization. It is none of these things; rather it is a life that is without a trace, a life as it actually is, which is without me.

It’s so dangerous to idealize anything, or anyone, or any place, because it gives that thing or person or place a kind of permission to not have to change, and not have to evolve. It encourages us to bury our heads in the sand, or in values that are really morally neutral but that we pretend are moral goods: tradition, community and family for example.

When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.

Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his mother did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much.

It was easy to idealize someone you barely knew.

The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.

...and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

We see what we want to see. We idealize each other with our own fantasies.

Fortitude, determination... in a way they're things that I idealize myself and am curious about.

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don't over-analyze your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness.

Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between.

It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.

We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Cities have more “image of God” per square inch than anywhere else, and so we must not idealize the country as somehow a more spiritual place than the city.

Young men make great mistakes in life; for one thing, they idealize love too much.

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

Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others

We writers of series fiction tend to idealize ourselves in our characters, giving them attributes we wish we possessed and ever more interesting lives.

I fantasize and idealize myself as Bugs Bunny, but I know deep down I'm Daffy Duck.