Ideals are the world's masters. [ J. G. Holland ]

Our ideals are our better selves. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]

Be true to your own highest convictions. [ William Ellery Channing ]

Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind. [ Horace Mann ]

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends. [ Lowell ]

Ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never located. [ Madame Sevigne ]

Ideality consists of the rainbow rays of intellect. [ Alfred Mercier ]

We build statues of snow, and weep to see them melt. [ Walter Scott ]

Ideals we do not make. We discover, not invent, them. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]

The ideal itself is but truth clothed in the forms of art. [ Octave Feuillet ]

What we need most is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real. [ F. H. Hedge ]

Without the ideal, the inexhaustible source of all progress, - what would man be? [ Mme. de Girardin ]

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended. [ Mrs. Oliphant ]

Every life has its actual blanks, which the ideal must fill up, or which else remain bare and profitless forever. [ Julia Ward Howe ]

It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion. [ Ruskin ]