Unattainable Ideals Quotes

If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man.

I go to the gym a lot, and I see these guys, these young actors or models there, really punishing themselves - I mean, just killing themselves. And then I'll see one of them on a billboard, with the artfully messy hair, looking as though it's just natural and easy to have a body like that.

However much I might have yearned to be one of The Beautiful Ones, particularly at those ghastly school discos, where any desperate attempt to impress the opposite sex lead to at best deep humiliation, I now feel extremely blessed that I wasn't.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelled shorter: ‘Paralysis.’

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

You don't really see ugly people that are old, or a bit grotty and smelly, in the media. If a Martian came down, they would think we were all tall, thin, attractive and wealthy.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.

There's a reason why there's a problem with bodies, and it's because you never actually get to see any normal versions of them.

Barbie ruined my life! It's a really bad image for women. For a long time I thought I was deformed - because my heels didn't touch the ground. I was walking around on tiptoes. What's up with that? I think that it's a bad thing for a woman to try to emulate.

I feel I'm such a big part of that insecurity that some girls might have because of my job, that girls think they have to be that picture. And even boys, they think that that picture exists, and it's so frustrating because I don't look like that picture - I wake up not looking like that picture.

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There's nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman - fat, thin, or in between - that she's a freak.

I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you're constantly being shown this garbage and you can't get there.

If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.

It's almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people.

He was so far from the gallant knights in her romantic fantasies...He was tarnished, scarred, imperfect.

As a girl, I remember looking up to pop singers, and they all had long, straight weaves and light skin. And I thought, 'That's what I have to look like if I'm going to be fierce and sexy and all those things.'

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

I think the glamour industry, all over the world, does portray a version that is 'Photoshopped' - a picture that is not very realistic.

There's this way pop culture has been rammed down our throats that people think that if they were just in the right place at the right time, they'd be married to Heidi Klum.

You see, Dash -- I was never the girl in your head. And you were never the boy in my head. I think we both knew that. It's only when we try to make the girl or boy in our head real that the true trouble comes. I did that with Carlos, and it was a bad failure. Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.

You're damned if you're too thin and you're damned if you're too heavy. According to the press I've been both. Its impossible to satisfy everyone and I suggest we stop trying.