Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.
--
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785)Immanuel Kant
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According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems unlikely that any 'ideal life' will be heavily contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more.
Simon Blackburn
The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
Wallace Stevens
Place before thyself the ideal of perfection, not that of happiness, for by doing what makes thee wiser and better, thou shalt find the peace and joy in which happiness consists.
John Lancaster Spalding
I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit- it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
Arthur Koestler
Kant, Immanuel
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss
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