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)
“Whoever has witnessed another’s ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth: and he that is wise will not abhor them. Was not the water made sweet with wood, that the virtue thereof might be known?”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 38:4-5.