“I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.”

As quoted in The Experience of the Foreign : Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992) by Antoine Berman
Variant translation: Romanticize the world.

Source: The Dervish House (2010), Ch. 6, §8 (p. 223)

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 304

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part II
Context: The rest of the Crew partook of the same lethargy. Raoul wrote for television, keeping carefully in mind, and complaining bitterly about, all the sponsor-fetishes of that industry. Slab painted in sporadic bursts, referring to himself as a Catatonic Expressionist and his work as “the ultimate in non-communication.” Melvin played the guitar and sang liberal folk songs. The pattern would have been familiar—bohemian, creative, arty—except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence; being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion and artistic “soul.” For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications

Variant: You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Source: Women

Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The Necessary Angel (1951)

Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?<br><br>&quot; Interview with Pensata Animal https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/interviewoct2009.html&quot;, Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009

As quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294