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0bb5f54
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
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youth
truth
ideals
real
nostalgia
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W. Somerset Maugham |
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fd515ac
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People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
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ideals
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F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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cbb56dd
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Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.
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fathers
daughters
ideals
perception
expectations
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Simone de Beauvoir |
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682f264
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Happiness consists not of having, but of being; not of possessing, but of enjoying. It is a warm glow of the heart at peace with itself. A martyr at the stake may have happiness that a king on his throne might envy. Man is the creator of his own happiness. It is the aroma of life, lived in harmony with high ideals. For what a man has he may be dependent upon others; what he is rests with him alone.
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joy
happiness
life
ideals
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David O. McKay |
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afd8bc2
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They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.
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idealism
politics
ideals
pragmatism
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G. K. Chesterton |
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18ca08a
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"And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes."
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lover
reality
dreams
love
heads
grounded
clouds
realist
dreamers
grass
firm
fall-in-love
ideals
purple
illusions
mountain
worlds
idealists
sky
dreaming
feet
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V.C. Andrews |
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2067336
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Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals.
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live
people
peaceful
ideals
real
way
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John Scalzi |
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432f153
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At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
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war
hermann-hesse
ideals
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Hermann Hesse |
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0c506fb
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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand--that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
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ideals
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Annie Dillard |
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4658d90
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...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' 'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.
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dying-for-your-beliefs
orhan-pamuk
ideals
martyrdom
snow
|
Orhan Pamuk |
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a4ecdb1
|
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
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worldviews
fashions
ideals
zeitgeist
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4f7b7d9
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Society is invincible--to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity--nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty--into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life--the real you.
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integrity
character
life
ideals
society
self
mediocrity
values
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E M Forster |
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e672d29
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Can we only speak when we are fully living what we are saying? If all our words had to cover all our actions, we would be doomed to permanent silence! Sometimes we are called to proclaim God's love even when we are not yet fully able to live it. Does that mean we are hypocrites? Only when our own words no longer call us to conversion. Nobody completely lives up to his or her own ideals and visions. But by proclaiming our ideals and visions with great conviction and great humility, we may gradually grow into the truth we speak. As long as we know that our lives always will speak louder than our words, we can trust that our words will remain humble.
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words
truth
ideals
lives
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Henri J.M. Nouwen |
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79f1f84
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Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
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virtue
good
goodness
life
betrayed
bursting
younger
older
trivial
ideals
virtuous
years
frank
old
frankness
betray
important
understand
ideal
experience
charm
knowledge
betrayal
young
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John Fowles |
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b2d5e14
|
The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
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heroism
future
fear
past
fatigue
variety
imaginary
enthusiasm
ideals
ease
|
G.K. Chesterton |
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6b9def8
|
in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.
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wrong
ideals
right
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Tony Judt |
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cfe8380
|
They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!
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earnest
ideals
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Margaret Atwood |
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3799a14
|
"Now don't run away." "I'm not. I learned to see beyond the soles of these shoes. I learned that behind this wretched life we lead there is a great ideal, a great hope. I learned that each individual life should be guided by that hope and by that ideal. And people who don't feel that must have died before they were born." He smiled and added, "Those aren't my words. It's something I heard someone else say years ago." "In your view ,then, I belong to the group who died before they were born?" "No, you belong to another group, the ones who haven't yet been born." "Aren't you forgetting about all my experience of life?" "Not at all, but experience is only worth anything when it's useful to other people, and you're not useful to anyone."
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useful
ideals
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José Saramago |
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e7eac6a
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Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do your best, and hope that you didn't slip, and become... well, Mediterranean in outlook.
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swedish
ideals
tolerance
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Alexander McCall Smith |
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6c59e92
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Es ist viel flacher, wenn du fur etwas Gutes und Ideales kampfst und nun meinst, du mussest es auch erreichen. Sind denn Ideale zum Erreichen da? Leben wir denn, wir Menschen, um den Tod abzuschaffen? Nein, wir leben, um ihn zu furchten und dann wieder zu lieben, und gerade seinetwegen gluht das bisschen Leben manchmal eine Stunde lang so schon.
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ideale
ideals
tod
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Hermann Hesse |
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b04584d
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He watched over word and thought and deed as jealously as if her clear eyes were to pass judgement on it... She held over him the unconscious influence that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an influence that would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and which she would certainly lose if she were ever false to them.
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influence
ideals
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l.m. montgomery |