Philosophical Idealism Quotes

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.

It would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians.

Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

The idealist regards facts as provisional.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it.

When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.

Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.

Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.

Idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet 'the happiness of man on earth' depends upon their combination.

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.