Isaiah Berlin Quotes

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life. And this is how that suffering happens-if we love someone, but do not love God, we demand total perfection and righteousness from that person, and when we do not get it, we become cruel and vindictive; yet we are demanding of a human being which he or she cannot possibly give.

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.

Nothing is so good it lasts eternally. Perfect situations must go wrong. But this has never yet prevented me wanting far too much for far too long.

Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.

We were trying to achieve miracles and reduce the world to what it cannot be.

The American Dream - that's our folly. That's our folly. Look where we're ending up.

Dreams that are planned are called frustration.

I don't want my work or me, as a person, to be held up as a paradigm because, as Richard Dawkins knows, if people hold you up too much, you're only ever going to disappoint them by being a human.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona - to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves.

Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.

One thing that previous practice doesn't always make perfect: Marriage.

I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

..there she is, and I am watching her through plexiglass, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two–this girl who was an idea that I loved. And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong by dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.

It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.

I believed that a husband must necessarily be an angel, impossible of corruption or contamination.

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

Perfectionism is self destructive simply because there's no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an unattainable goal.

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.