IDEALISM • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Idealism

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/aɪdˈilɪzəm/ Listen

Idealism

noun

(philosophy) the philosophical theory that ideas are the only reality.

Impracticality by virtue of thinking of things in their ideal form rather than as they really are.

Elevated ideals or conduct; the quality of believing that ideals should be pursued. Synonyms: high-mindedness, noble-mindedness.

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Etymology of 'Idealism'

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"Idealism" Quotes from Famous Books

... him had been readers of Nature or the poems, of Representative Men, and of English Traits. For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre. In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, "If he asks me where I live," said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, "I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the ...

— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... lecture lacked were ideas. Of the artistic value of each material; of the correspondence between material or method and the imaginative faculty seeking to find expression; of the capacities for realism and idealism that reside in each material; of the historical and human side of the art—he said nothing. He showed the various instruments and how they are used, but he treated them entirely as instruments for the hand. He never once brought ...

— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... doctrines are founded on a metaphysical theory known as subjective idealism, and advanced centuries before her birth. It posits the all-comprehensiveness of mind and the non-existence of matter. If bodies do not exist, diseases cannot exist, and must be only mental delusions. If the mind is freed of these delusions the disease ...

— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... fresh solidity by the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of religion. If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test for separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to express concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy drives exactly ...

— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... these last few months Diana had gradually come to know the lofty strain of idealism which ran through the man's whole nature. Passionate, obstinate, unyielding—he could be each and all in turn, but, side by side with these exterior characteristics, there ran a streak of almost feminine ...

— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

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