“The struggle must go on. We are but the atoms in the incessant human struggle towards the light that shines in the darkness— the Ideal of economic, political and spiritual liberation of mankind!”— Emma Goldman, lib.berkeley.edu
“Music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.”— Billy Corgan, rollingstone.com
“Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.”— Blaise Pascal, amazon.com
“You don’t have to change the world or find your one true purpose to lead a meaningful life. A good life is a life of goodness — and that’s something anyone can aspire to, no matter their dreams or circumstances.”— Emily Esfahani Smith, nytimes.com
“Most young adults won’t achieve the idealistic goals they’ve set for themselves. They won’t become the next Mark Zuckerberg. They won’t have obituaries that run in newspapers like this one. But that doesn’t mean their lives will lack significance and worth. We all have a circle of people whose lives…”— Emily Esfahani Smith, nytimes.com
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”— Anne Frank, amazon.com
“An artist is a man who tries to express the inexpressible. He struggles and suffers knowing that he can never realize his most perfect ideal. Occasional moments of ecstasy lure him on, but nothing is final in art, it is always progressing.”— Alvin Langdon Coburn, masters-of-photography.com
“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”— Robert Mapplethorpe, news.artnet.com
“Every day I think about untwisting and untangling these strings I'm in. And to lead a pure life. I look ahead at a clear sky, ain't gonna get there, but it's a nice dream, it's a nice dream.”— Iggy Pop, open.spotify.com
“Dreams will find their dreamers and all a dreamer has to do is remember.”— Mahmoud Darwish, amazon.com
“Old souls can be seen as strange people because they often hold unconventional ideals and standards of living. They often feel a sense of separation from themselves and the ‘real world’ because things like obtaining great wealth, owning a lot of expensive possessions, and other traits of living a ma…”— Koty Neelis, thoughtcatalog.com
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”— Steven Pressfield, amazon.com
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendent trees.’ I see it all. I…”— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com
“Do you think someone is a worse painter if, having painted a model of what the finest and most beautiful human being would be like and having rendered every detail of his picture adequately, he could not prove that such a man could come into being?”— Plato, amazon.com
“The experience of the concentration camps shows that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and man’s 'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man.”— Hannah Arendt, amazon.com
“He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn ga…”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”— Paul Kalanithi, amazon.com
“The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions— continually shifting potential; in other words 'out there' or 'in here' or both: God's voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human— or both at once. Am I leaving thi…”— John Gardner, Peter Mickelsson, amazon.com