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idealism
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idealism as in:  youthful idealism

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.   (source)
  • Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.   (source)
  • My grandmother, LaRue, had come of age in the 1950s, in the decade of idealistic fever that burned after World War II.   (source)
    idealistic = having the belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • They met in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, and so whenever anything happened there, even something terrible, it was like all of a sudden they were not large sedentary creatures, but the young and idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and their rapture was such that they didn't even glance over at me as...   (source)
  • He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence.   (source)
    idealism = belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • Anyway, they have this discussion, and the kid is an idealist in a temporary way.   (source)
    idealist = someone who believes behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.   (source)
    idealist = someone who unrealistically believes that behavior should be guided by high ideals and standards
  • And it is very odd but those who see the changes—who dream, who will not give up—are called idealists . . . and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"!   (source)
    idealists = people who believe behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards -- often implying that they are unrealistic
  • How could men sustain a high level of idealistic commitment through the grim experiences of disease, death, exhaustion, and frustration as the war ground on year after year?   (source)
    idealistic = the belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • Naïve, idealistic hopes had been shattered.†   (source)
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show 67 more with this conextual meaning
  • We see the child's perception as he moves through a horrifying continuum, from an idealistic family life to becoming a "prisoner of war" in his own home.†   (source)
  • Generous, caring, idealistic women, Snowman thinks of them now.†   (source)
  • Lucy Wainright was idealistic, nothing wrong with that.†   (source)
  • I loved the newsroom and the quirky, brainy, neurotic, idealistic people it attracted.†   (source)
  • Apart from these everyday occupations, however, Zyskind was an idealistic socialist.†   (source)
  • He was so idealistic and romantic about things like patriotism and serving the country that I couldn't help but believe him.†   (source)
  • He reacted against the idealistic philosophy of Spinoza just as Kierkegaard reacted against Hegel.†   (source)
  • He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh.†   (source)
  • Meeker named the idealistic new settlement after his boss at the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, who had given some career advice that proved legendary: "Go west, young man."†   (source)
  • In the 1790s, it was common to dismiss the abolitionists as idealistic moralizers who didn't appreciate economics or understand geopolitical complexities such as the threat from France.†   (source)
  • I was very idealistic.†   (source)
  • James Stewart plays a naive, idealistic man sent into the Senate, where everyone believes they can take advantage of him.†   (source)
  • A bit idealistic, perhaps.†   (source)
  • Jack had this hero side to history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side.†   (source)
  • Belle was a young woman with strong convictions of her own, but she was also idealistic, a bit of a dreamer, and she was swayed by her forceful husband.†   (source)
  • But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.†   (source)
  • It sounded so simplistic...Idealistic?†   (source)
  • Their leader is a young lawyer, like you were once, Gustavo, idealistic and self-assured.†   (source)
  • He was a good boy, selfless and idealistic, as one is at that age.†   (source)
  • I mean that your attitude may be highly idealistic-as I am sure it is-but, unfortunately, most people do not share your lofty frame of mind and will misinterpret your action in the one manner which would be most abhorrent to you.†   (source)
  • Others, perhaps more idealistic, maintain that police supervision on an increased scale is driving the houses out of existence.†   (source)
  • All right, so I doubted that the relationship would involve much in the way of high-toned love, for my attraction to Leslie was largely primal in nature, lacking the poetic and idealistic dimension of my buried passion for Sophie.†   (source)
  • Somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, four government cars driven by idealistic young VISTAs stood in formation facing the rising tides and looking for the boat from Yamacraw Island.†   (source)
  • There had been a time, when Tyler was a boy, when Mother had been idealistic about education.   (source)
    idealistic = believing that good things would result
  • Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble.   (source)
    idealistic = having the belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • There was the countercultural idealist who passed through the village of Tanana in the early 1970s, announcing that he intended to spend the rest of his life "communing with Nature."   (source)
    idealist = someone who believes behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
  • These were the idealists.   (source)
    idealists = people who believe behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards -- often implying that they are unrealistic
  • Romance may be called Idealism in the realm of sentiment.   (source)
  • At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.   (source)
  • How could I explain my idealism to this man?   (source)
  • It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul.   (source)
  • When we first went, we were still idealistic, but that didn't last.†   (source)
  • This is not the time for heroic stands or idealistic posturing; this is a time for survival.†   (source)
  • So they'd gotten married, young, eager, idealistic.†   (source)
  • He was very young and it was a kind of noble idealistic goal.†   (source)
  • Both were charismatic, idealistic young men beloved by their fanatical followers.†   (source)
  • Idealistic college kids often dream of becoming chefs or farmers, instead of doctors and lawyers.†   (source)
  • We can't adopt an idealistic theory, which—†   (source)
  • Young, brash, idealistic, always trying to help people out.†   (source)
  • To become a climber was to join a self-contained, rabidly idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large.†   (source)
  • What I am trying to say — and I do not think this an unfair comment — is that we were a much more idealistic generation.†   (source)
  • An idealistic, melancholic Englishman named Maurice Wilson had not been so fortunate when he'd attempted a similarly reckless as cent thirteen years before Denman.†   (source)
  • Even so, even taken on their own terms, his statements were, surely, far too idealistic, far too theoretical, to deserve respect.†   (source)
  • But by and large, I believe these generalizations to be accurate, and indeed, such 'idealistic' motivations as I have described have played a large part in my own career.†   (source)
  • "Don't forget this," Disney told them, "it's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that."†   (source)
  • Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.†   (source)
  • Although idealistic Westerners like Ziemer who work at the Pheriche clinic receive no remuneration and must even pay their own travel expenses to and from Nepal, it is a prestigious posting that attracts highly qualified applicants from around the world.†   (source)
  • For we were, as I say, an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practised one's skills, but to what end one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world, and saw that, as professionals, the surest means of doing so would be to serve the great gentlemen of our times in whose hands civilization had been entrusted.†   (source)
  • Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter, But a number of idealistic mountaineers continued to insist that a gifted athlete blessed with rare physiological attributes could, after a lengthy period of acclimatization, climb the peak without bottled oxygen.†   (source)
  • Yet it is easy to see why the Jews have inspired such hatred in Christians as well as in people like yourself—Gottgldubiger, as you said to me just this morning—righteous and idealistic people who are only striving for a new order in a new world.†   (source)
  • Almost always he nodded his head affirmatively, delivered an oily, ingratiating, and hollow sermon about the good job I was doing and how much he appreciated the letters I was writing him and how I reminded him of the young Henry Piedmont—idealistic, capable of sacrifice, and sweating for the improvement of mankind.†   (source)
  • There was something upright and idealistic even in the thin elderly legs with their scrawny muscles.†   (source)
  • That's the worst of Americans-they're so sentimental and idealistic.†   (source)
  • It was easy to see why he had been so shy, so unsophisticated, so idealistic.†   (source)
  • The idealistic face turned his way: it wore a look of innocent craft.†   (source)
  • They both spoke rather guttural English with slight American accents — Mr Lehr had left Germany when he was a boy to escape military service: he had a shrewd, lined and idealistic face.†   (source)
  • He felt daring and idealistic and cosmopolitan.†   (source)
  • Of course it is idealistic, German, ultra-profound.†   (source)
  • As usual, his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud's was the idealistic.†   (source)
  • "Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar details!†   (source)
  • It is too much to ask; but I so seldom see just what I want—the idealistic in the real.†   (source)
  • If but the death sentence could be commuted to life imprisonment— And the Governor, who was a very earnest and conscientious man, listened with all attention to McMillan, whom, as he saw and concluded was decidedly an intense and vital and highly idealistic person.†   (source)
  • Gottlieb was worried: "I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty when he came purring to me, but I did not t'ink he would try to turn you into a megaphone all so soon in one day!†   (source)
  • Those idealistic powers of resistance to illness and death, whose defeat by the overwhelming forces of base nature so pained Herr Settembrini, were absolutely alien to litre Naphta; and his method for coping with the deterioration of his body was not sorrow and gloom, but scornful high spirits and an unparalleled aggressiveness, a mania for intellectual doubt, negation, and confusion, all of which severely aggravated the other man's melancholy and daily intensified their intellectual arguments.†   (source)
  • Joachim did not ask; but if one of us chose not to follow his example and posed the question, then, by way of general observation, it might very well be noted that considerable material was available for an intellectual exchange between such men and comrades, both of whose basic perspectives bore an idealistic stamp—one of them having educated himself to believe that matter is the spirit's Original Sin, a nasty rank growth in response to a stimulus, whereas the other, as a doctor, was accustomed to teaching that organic illness was a secondary phenomenon.†   (source)
  • In his conversations with Anna Sergyevna he expressed more strongly than ever his calm contempt for everything idealistic; but when he was alone, with indignation he recognised idealism in himself.†   (source)
  • He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth.†   (source)
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idealism as in:  philosophical idealism

show 3 more with this conextual meaning
  • Idealism dominated 19th-century Western philosophical thought.
  • I enrolled in every course I could squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism to the history of secularism to ethics and law.   (source)
  • We can begin to state the difference between realism and idealism in terms of this opposition of contents and objects.   (source)
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.†   (source)
  • She had once been an idealist who needed to give all her talent to a great goal, but now she realized that all that she had done was meaningless, and the future could not have any meaningful pursuits, either.†   (source)
  • As the two young idealists left the hotel, the Count watched through the revolving doors.†   (source)
  • He was an idealist and a purist.†   (source)
  • It's certainly the idealist's ideal.†   (source)
  • Under the drawing, Owen had written: "OFTEN A SYMBOL OF REBORN IDEALISM, OR HOPE—OR AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY."†   (source)
  • His friends were like him: disrupters and rebuilders, idealists.†   (source)
  • Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.†   (source)
  • My grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer.†   (source)
  • Sometimes then I thought of the brave and stupid idealists heading out into the great dark in their slow and leaking ships, carrying embryos and ideologies with equal faith and care.†   (source)
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show 186 more examples with any meaning
  • No, they're idealists, too, and all of us idealists are dirty communists.†   (source)
  • Sullivan saw himself as an artist first, an idealist.†   (source)
  • God's word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long.†   (source)
  • The idealist even in a crisis.†   (source)
  • It is, for example, S0ren Kierkegaard's reaction to the idealism of the Romantics.†   (source)
  • Am I such a crazed idealist?'†   (source)
  • Valentine never lost that— neither his destructive idealism nor his passionate loathing of anything he considered 'nonhuman.'†   (source)
  • Even the idealists had doubts, great pangs of conscience at having deserted their motherland.†   (source)
  • In the High District, a few students, afire with idealism, made faces at their relatives huddled before the television screen with grim expressions and went out to join the procession.†   (source)
  • Did my idealism cloud my commitment to the woman who would be my wife?†   (source)
  • He found all types: idealists, ambitious people, adventurers, those with social resentments, even common criminals.†   (source)
  • In 1924 Mallory was thirty-eight, a married schoolteacher with three young children, he was the product of upper-tier English society, he was also an aesthete and idealist with decidedly romantic sensibilities.†   (source)
  • Although one sympathizes to some extent with the idealism contained in such an argument, there can be little doubt that it is the result, like Mr Smith's sentiments tonight, of misguided thinking.†   (source)
  • Kattler is disappointed by how fast the idealism of 1989 vanished, but feels little nostalgia for the old East Germany.†   (source)
  • There were the young Nisei men and women, the idealists, the thinkers, the leaders, scattered across the country.†   (source)
  • It was a child's way of seeing things—or an idealist's.†   (source)
  • In the beginning, like most young teachers, she'd been an idealist, someone who assumed that every child would respond to her if she tried hard enough.†   (source)
  • What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time.†   (source)
  • The startled wrinkles would always remain, like deep black scars, and Yossarian felt sorry for the gentle, moral, middle-aged idealist, as he felt sorry for so many people whose shortcomings were not large and whose troubles were light.†   (source)
  • A growing number of Americans agree with Jackie that the Kennedy White House is a similarly mythical place and a bulwark of idealism in the midst of the cold war.†   (source)
  • In those days he was a headstrong idealist.†   (source)
  • You have enough idealism to fill a hundred novels.†   (source)
  • In 1986, Mortenson began a graduate program in neurophysiology at Indiana University, thinking idealistically that with some inspired hard work he might be able to find a cure for his sister.†   (source)
  • Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say.†   (source)
  • In spite of me, such notions seep in along with the gimcrack teachers and northern-trained idealists.†   (source)
  • "Idealist," he said again.†   (source)
  • I became a police officer because I thought, rather idealistically, that the police existed to prevent crimes like that.†   (source)
  • All his idealism would have withered in the face of the baby's raw cry, but he didn't know.... Alessandro turned to Nicolo.†   (source)
  • He is the man whom people call an idealist.†   (source)
  • You're ....easily impressed ....sort of a ....pragmatic idealism.†   (source)
  • You're an idealist, praise be.†   (source)
  • But for others their initial idealism, even if intensified by more visceral emotions, persisted to the end.†   (source)
  • War is a religious conviction to an eighteen-year-old boy, and though it later became hard for me to relate to that boy, I had at least to acknowledge the sincerity of his passionate, blazing idealism and his total willingness to sacrifice his life for his country.†   (source)
  • Then Death is an idealist.†   (source)
  • There was doubtless even a certain idealism in his effort.†   (source)
  • And so Will Jr had gone to Batavia full of joy, in the rich sunlight of his idealism and personal ambition.†   (source)
  • The man, an imaginative idealist, had gone to England in 1940, joined the Commandos, and got himself killed.†   (source)
  • All of them, without exception, clung to some dogma or other, satisfied with words and superficialities, but Father Nikolai had gone through Tolstoyism and revolutionary idealism and was still moving forward.†   (source)
  • These are the words of an idealist, an independent, a fighter—a man of deep conviction, fearless courage, sincere honesty—George W. Norris of Nebraska.†   (source)
  • Marquis, marks and counter-mark: FATHER-JACQUES: Idealists.†   (source)
  • For instance, he had the conventionally "progressive" ideas about the color bar, the superficial progressiveness of the idealist that seldom survives a conflict with self-interest.†   (source)
  • Maybe I'm just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible.†   (source)
  • face's, saying he wasn't an idealist, and she shivered, despite the coat she was wearing.†   (source)
  • Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say.†   (source)
  • He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence.†   (source)
  • Children see things very well sometimes—and idealists even better.†   (source)
  • I have never believed in the efficacy of idealists-have you?†   (source)
  • At thirty-five, Dan was a souring idealist.†   (source)
  • Left-wing idealists who devoted themselves to work among the people.†   (source)
  • He was an idealist, they said, and that was true too.†   (source)
  • Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.†   (source)
  • granddaughter, that I'm practically all alone in the world, and that my body and my soul have shrunken away, just as Ferula predicted with her curse; that all that awaits me now is to die like a dog, and that my green-haired granddaughter is all I have left, the only person I really care about; that unfortunately she turned out to be an idealist, a family disease, one of those people cut out to get involved in problems and make those closest to her suffer; that she took it into her head to help fugitives get asylum in the foreign embassies, something she did without thinking, I'm sure, without realizing that the country is at war, whether war against international Communism or its ow†   (source)
  • Sometimes he was lucky and they would hide together from the light of the idealists at war over the details of unworkable plans and unfundable mandates.†   (source)
  • You're an idealist, Bryan.†   (source)
  • I knew he was a mystic idealist!†   (source)
  • They were branded, however, as theorists, visionary idealists, purists, talkers of academic nonsense, weepers of crocodile tears.†   (source)
  • Luke's an idealist.†   (source)
  • We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of a priori intuitions such as space and time, but we do not create these objects out of our imagination, as pure philosophical idealists would maintain.†   (source)
  • The majority probably figured they were stuck with some idealist who thought removal of grades would make them happier and thus work harder, when it was obvious that without grades everyone would just loaf.†   (source)
  • You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists'—may the God you invented forgive you!†   (source)
  • He saw me approaching-and he did not know, but I knew, what made him whirl upon me and cry, Tin so sick of all of you Impractical idealists!†   (source)
  • Cuffy Meigs tried to avoid her; his manner was part scorn, as if he considered her an impractical idealist, part superstitious awe, as if she possessed some incomprehensible power with which he preferred not to tangle.†   (source)
  • Throughout the nation there arose a remarkable array of reformers, muckrakers and good-government movements, represented in the Senate by a new breed of idealists and independents, men of ability and statesmanship who would have ranked with the more famous names of an earlier day.†   (source)
  • Helen, busy tuning the car radio, trying to bring in fresh news, said, "You're a bit of an idealist, aren't you, Randy?"†   (source)
  • He was not only an idealist but an absolutist and perfectionist, incapable of leaving unresolved such unresolvable questions as, for instance, that of free will and necessity.†   (source)
  • Our political life is becoming so expensive, so mechanized and so dominated by professional politicians and public relations men that the idealist who dreams of independent statesmanship is rudely awakened by the necessities of election and accomplishment.†   (source)
  • And even the necessity for the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead, who prevent all political situations from meeting the description supplied by Shaw: "smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, mildewed by expedience, stretched out of shape with wirepulling and putrefied with permeation."†   (source)
  • They could have found no one less suited for the work—an idealist, sentimental, generous, fond of good music and books (he was a member of the Columbia Record Club and three different book clubs).†   (source)
  • A dedicated man, an idealist.†   (source)
  • But if he was an idealist, bookish, he knew trades, too; knew the talk of farmers at the feedmill, a farmer and feedmill philosopher himself, and the talk of shopkeepers, ministers, doctors, bankers—whose taxes he had figured, whose suits he had carried into court, and whose political opinions he heatedly debated from morning to night when he was home from Washington.†   (source)
  • It had not taken Hodge long to see what no doubt he'd been subtly aware of all his life, that those who called his father an idealist were snatching at words to express a feeling that had nothing to do with the word they happened to get hold of: the old man was in blunt truth superior, an implicit condemnation of men who were not; in short, a source of unrest.†   (source)
  • Both idealism and materialism are themes you will find all through the history of philosophy.†   (source)
  • Stenton professionalized our idealism, monetized our utopia.†   (source)
  • It takes the stance of pure historical idealism and espouses a doomsday theory.†   (source)
  • This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression.†   (source)
  • It treats the universe as limited, which is absolutely a form of reactionary idealism....†   (source)
  • and this is no age for impractical idealism.†   (source)
  • Immediately there was a chorus: 'Idealism, mysticism, Goethe's Naturphilosophie, neo-Schellingism.'†   (source)
  • She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, he could not help thinking of him as one of those fatal men possessed by a dangerous idealism and an intransigent purity that color everything they touch with disaster, especially the women who have the misfortune to fall in love with them.†   (source)
  • Both were influenced by Hegel's mode of thought, but both rejected his 'world spirit,' or his idealism.†   (source)
  • If Demoxie worked, they said, then laughed—when Demoxie is implemented, of course it will work, they said—and when it does, you'll finally have a fully engaged populace, and when you do, the country and the world will hear from the youth, and their inherent idealism and progressivism will upend the planet.†   (source)
  • He thought that both the idealism of the Romantics and Hegel's 'historicism' had obscured the individual's responsibility for his own life.†   (source)
  • This standpoint is called idealism.†   (source)
  • "It is Pantheism or Idealism," he said.†   (source)
  • Glad to see your idealism hasn't been damaged," said Simon, and though his voice was light, Clary heard another voice through it.†   (source)
  • Indeed, Mr Harry Smith's words tonight remind me very much of the sort of misguided idealism which beset significant sections of our generation throughout the twenties and thirties.†   (source)
  • Whose idealism could survive all that?†   (source)
  • Another historian of the Union army, influenced by Linderman, maintains that "whatever idealism that the soldiers brought with them into the army faded" by the latter years of the war."†   (source)
  • There are certain members of our profession who would have it that it ultimately makes little difference what sort of employer one serves; who believe that the sort of idealism prevalent amongst our generation — namely the notion that we butlers should aspire to serve those great gentlemen who further the cause of humanity — is just high-flown talk with no grounding in reality.†   (source)
  • Not only patriotism but also the idealism of 1861 persisted among many veterans, including a Pennsylvania private who wrote to his wife from a hospital after a couple of hundred miles of marching up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, the last twenty-five of them in bare feet.†   (source)
  • People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.†   (source)
  • This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in "common sense" language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid.†   (source)
  • Those gatherings were group confessions of guilt, of cynicism, of rudderless idealism, and ultimately of hope.†   (source)
  • How could you expect anything except from a few of us who for whatever reason—idealism, moral conviction, simple human solidarity, whatever—want to do what we can to save some of your lives?†   (source)
  • Drawing heavily on C. Vann Woodward's brilliant study of Tom Watson of Georgia and concentrating on other hagridden folk heroes like "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman and James K. Vardaman and "Cotton Ed" Smith and Huey Long, I demonstrated how democratic idealism and honest concern for the common man were virtues which linked all these men together, at least in their early careers, along with a concomitant and highly vocal opposition to monopoly capitalism, industrial and business fat cats and "big money."†   (source)
  • It was a garden for idealism, where there was painting and poetry and card tricks, and sober worship on Sunday evenings; where neighbors got together and spoke thoughtfully of the Future of the United States, and of taxes and balanced trade and the troubles in Europe.†   (source)
  • I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days.†   (source)
  • That's what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little Jackie Burden.†   (source)
  • If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.†   (source)
  • Harry Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself out finely as an idealist and contemner of the world, as a melancholy hermit and growling prophet.†   (source)
  • Well, I've always heard, from everybody, that he's a sort of saint, the one pure idealist, utterly incorruptible and...†   (source)
  • He was something of an idealist and was much distressed by the inadequacy of medical facilities in the country town where his mother lived.†   (source)
  • There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life?†   (source)
  • He considered Guy Francon an impractical idealist; he was not restrained by an Classic dogma; he was much more skillful and liberal: he built anything.†   (source)
  • I looked after him for a long while as he disappeared into the distance along the leafless avenue with the good-natured and slightly comic gait of an ingenuous idealist.†   (source)
  • "I can't understand it," he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, "I can't understand how Ellsworth got so much power.... And Ellsworth's a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he's so friendly and witty, and what an erudition!†   (source)
  • You make out a good case, Gail, and I wouldn't know what to say against it, I don't know where you're wrong, but it doesn't sound right to me, because Ellsworth Toohey—now don't misunderstand me, I don't agree with Toohey's political views at all, I know he's a radical, but on the other hand you've got to admit that he's a great idealist with a heart as big as a house—well, Ellsworth Toohey said...†   (source)
  • I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have stated, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.†   (source)
  • They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist.†   (source)
  • —I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann.†   (source)
  • I know you think me Utopian, don't you—an idealist?†   (source)
  • That strange idealist had found a practical use for it at once—unerringly, as it were.†   (source)
  • "Well," said Amory, "if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it."†   (source)
  • Between the idealists, and the political economists, Margaret had a bad time.†   (source)
  • In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams.†   (source)
  • "What are you," asked the big man, "one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists?†   (source)
  • The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants.†   (source)
  • I'm prejudiced in their favor; I'm an IDEALIST!†   (source)
  • If one classed him at all it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the air.†   (source)
  • Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of the physical characteristics of love.†   (source)
  • As an idealist of the pathological, if not to say a pathological idealist, such a man will see himself at the starting point of a sequence of thought that very quickly flows into the problem of being-in-general—that is to say, into the problem of the relationship between mind and matter.†   (source)
  • But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself.†   (source)
  • A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number.†   (source)
  • They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.'†   (source)
  • Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while not accorded conviction.†   (source)
  • beforehand but could no longer find in my head, to an extent which would enable me, during the long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually making grow, as a book grows when one is writing it, she threw me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me salute her before I had identified her now urged me to catch the ball that she tossed to me (as though she had been a companion, with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom my sou†   (source)
  • The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly opposite terms.†   (source)
  • The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.†   (source)
  • For what had happened was that, while I recognised in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in one of Bergotte's works, which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but rather of the 'idea†   (source)
  • He was an idealist.†   (source)
  • No pure idealist, he.†   (source)
  • On the contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, my philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thing in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart.†   (source)
  • Margaret was no morbid idealist.†   (source)
  • Just one thing—I don't ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don't count a picayune with you beside your sense of duty—but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren't just plain German?†   (source)
  • I'm a cynical idealist.†   (source)
  • Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas!†   (source)
  • I want to join an idealist society, I'll lead the opposition in it, I'll say I am a realist, but not a materialist, he he!†   (source)
  • IDEALIST
    This once, the fancy wrought in me
    Is really too despotic:
    Forsooth, if I am all I see,
    I must be idiotic!†   (source)
  • 'It's something astonishing,' pursued Bazarov, 'these old idealists, they develop their nervous systems till they break down ...so balance is lost.†   (source)
  • But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony.†   (source)
  • You—a Schiller, you—an idealist!†   (source)
  • He was not born an idealist, and his fastidiously dry and sensuous soul, with its French tinge of cynicism was not capable of dreaming.... 'Do you know what?'†   (source)
  • I earned thirteen dollars a week and I had to support four people with it, and should I risk that thirteen dollars by acting idealistically?†   (source)
  • There is self-portraiture in the remark: one sees the moral idealism of the man; it is there, unquestionably, but he hopes that the world will never force it to obtrude itself.†   (source)
  • There they were, with their enormous vitality, their tainted blood, their meaty health, their sanity, their insanity, their humor, their superstition, their meanness, their generosity, their fanatic idealism, their unyielding materialism.†   (source)
  • To show the state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed quite simply, WOMEN AND POVERTY, in block letters; but what followed was something like this: Condition in Middle Ages of, Habits in the Fiji Islands of, Worshipped as goddesses by, Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of, Greater conscientiousness of, South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among, Attractiveness of, Offered as sacrifice to, Small size of brain of, Profounder sub-consciousness of, Less hair on the body of, Mental, moral and physical inferiority of, Love of children of, Greater length of life of, Weaker muscles of, Strength of affections of, Vanit†   (source)
  • Her plain red face had great kindliness, and more idealism than kindliness, and more generalship than idealism.†   (source)
  • No one harbored a fairer admiration for mere goodness, but she had been obliged to watch herself sacrificing her kindliness, almost her idealism, to generalship, so dreadful were the struggles to obtain her subsidies from her superiors in the church.†   (source)
  • When he came to New York, he was preceded by a small, private fame; a few trickles of rumor had seeped down from Harvard about an unusual person named Ellsworth Toohey; a few people, among the extreme intellectuals and the extremely wealthy, heard these rumors and promptly forgot what they heard, but remembered the name; it remained in their minds with a vague connotation of such things as brilliance, courage, idealism.†   (source)
  • They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist.†   (source)
  • The days of idealism and superstition are over.†   (source)
  • I want to leave it to free will and idealism.†   (source)
  • On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.†   (source)
  • Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism.†   (source)
  • How could I explain my idealism to this man?†   (source)
  • Both out of idealism, and for practical reasons, humankind was about to provide the remedy.†   (source)
  • It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul.†   (source)
  • You want me to see such efforts as idealism or even some sort of religiosity, is that it?†   (source)
  • He's got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and the patriots like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him.†   (source)
  • 'Our greatness, however, lies not alone in punchful prosperity but equally in that public spirit, that forward-looking idealism and brotherhood, which has marked Zenith ever since its foundation by the Fathers.†   (source)
  • But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant:—It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.†   (source)
  • If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.†   (source)
  • By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes.†   (source)
  • He had always had a passion for life, and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it.†   (source)
  • But I was conscious of the practical wisdom, of what would be called nowadays the realism with which she tempered the ardent idealism of my grandmother's nature, and I knew that now the mischief was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing pleasure of her company, and not to disturb my father again.†   (source)
  • However, with Rosemary's sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on something except herself.†   (source)
  • He told Clif that he was going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do something clever about his dual engagement.†   (source)
  • It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol.†   (source)
  • He was weak and vain, so vain that you had to be on the watch constantly not to hurt his feelings; he mingled idleness and idealism so that he could not separate them.†   (source)
  • That was the real, factual side of the matter—a set of facts that stood all to itself, that had nothing whatever to do with the idealism of the heart, and that was triumphantly vanquished by the spirit of beauty and music.†   (source)
  • Their vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was something quite different: here was no moral appeal; and the contemplation of these works could help no one to lead a purer and a higher life.†   (source)
  • Along with his frock coat, by the way, he wore his soft, floppy collar and his sandals over gray socks, which gave the impression of some fundamental idealism, although Hans Castorp found the look rather startling.†   (source)
  • He felt vaguely that here was something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness; it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity, ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by the more vivid light in which they were seen.†   (source)
  • But out of idealism and love for the beauty of song, he ignored his distress and, despite frequent sighs, gave it all he had, until finally he sank down at the base of a thick pine tree—totally out of breath and gasping, half-blind, with only bright patterns dancing before his eyes, his pulse skittering.†   (source)
  • Los' idealism, got be physcal anmal," he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, "got be Prussian 'bout ev'thing, women 'specially.†   (source)
  • Nobility was, rather, a certain lofty abundance, generosita, which revealed itself by ascribing to form a human value quite independent of content; the cultivation of public speaking as an art for art's sake, this legacy of Greco-Roman civilization, which humanists, the uomini letterati, had restored for those who spoke Romance languages, for them at least, was the source of every further meaningful idealism, including political idealism.†   (source)
  • The idealism of Berkeley[702] is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.†   (source)
  • When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest the king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the accused person would be decided in the king's arena, a structure which well deserved its name, for, although its form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated solely from the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted form of human thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.†   (source)
  • The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality.†   (source)
  • There are degrees in idealism.†   (source)
  • In his conversations with Anna Sergyevna he expressed more strongly than ever his calm contempt for everything idealistic; but when he was alone, with indignation he recognised idealism in himself.†   (source)
  • The effect left by the lofty idealism of his speech was somewhat marred, and Fetyukovitch's expression, as he watched him walk away, seemed to suggest to the public "this is a specimen of the lofty-minded persons who accuse him."†   (source)
  • For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man every success; I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his elder brother is suffering.†   (source)
  • About Wilson himself, who was "a good man, but an idealist."†   (source)
  • You're a—you're an idealist!†   (source)
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