Zafar Mirzo quote: “Ideals, if imposed, will cease to be them.”

“The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

July 1932 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ps_DtS_PFb4C&q=%22The+basis+of+insincerity+is+the+idealized+image+we+hold+of+ourselves+and+wish+to+impose+on+others%22&pg=PT141#v=onepage, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Volume One (1931-1934)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

“Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 226

“There is no such thing as an age for love … because the man capable of loving — in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation — never ceases to love.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: There is no such thing as an age for love... because the man capable of loving — in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation — never ceases to love. I will go further; he never ceases to love the same person. You know the experiment that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness consisted? He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood, then he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other. In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type. Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life we should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or even twenty different embodiments.

“[To work is to pray. ] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Laborare est orare.
Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Part I. Introduction. 3. The Origins of the Style
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

“Idealism is constituted by the metaphysical value it sets upon ideals, not by the aesthetic or the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. It is always distinct from mysticism (which at the core is simply emotionalism), and still more so from voluntarism. Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute reality;”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix C: The System vs. The View of the Oxford Essayists, p.407

“Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.”

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 311
Context: There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.

“Indians today are governed by different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the Preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

“There is no ideal system just as there are no ideal persons, ideal families or ideal cities, we have to get away from ideals.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946–2022) Russian politician and political activist

"Aging Rebel: Vladimir Zhirinovsky Is Enjoying Another Moment" in The Moscow Times https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/09/02/aging-rebel-vladimir-zhirinovsky-is-enjoying-another-moment-a55177 (2 September 2016)

“Ideals, if imposed, will cease to be them.”

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