Joseph Epstein Quotes

We have to deal with the world as we find it. The world of what it takes to get this done.

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity.

You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be.

The ideal man doesn't exist. A husband is easier to find.

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.

You can't be the perfect member of Congress and the perfect mother 100 percent of the time. And probably, you'd be a pretty annoying person if you were.

It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Therefore it does not help to sneer at the imperfection of today's reality or to preach absolutes as a daily agenda.

I don't think people should confuse fantasy and reality because no one is perfect - we all know that.

What is right and what is practicable are two different things.

If one cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them.

Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.

It is the misfortune of those who are concerned in conducting human affairs that, however pure and capacious their own conceptions may be, they must accommodate themselves to the circumstances with which they are environed and use the instruments that are within their reach.

My philosophy is that you do what you have to do.