Ideal and Virtue
Given the complexity of putting ideals into practice, and resolving conflicts between them, it is not uncommon to see them reduced to dogma. One way to avoid this, according to Bernard Crick, is to have ideals that themselves are descriptive of a process, rather than an outcome. His political virtues try to raise the practical habits useful in resolving disputes into ideals of their own. A virtue, in general, is an ideal that one can make a habit.
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Famous quotes containing the words ideal and, ideal and/or virtue:
“All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“The idealist is incorrigible: if he is expelled from his heaven, he makes an ideal out of hell.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)