In order to walk, you have to know where you are going. The same thing is needed to live wisely and well. You should know where your life and the life of humankind is leading to.
Perfection is inherent to God. The desire for perfection inherent to man.
— Goethe
Life is not given us to have fun without toil. No, life is a battle and a campaign. A battle between good and evil, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, love and lust; life is a march of our self towards the realization of the ideal which shines like a shimmering dawn to our minds and our hearts.
— Giuseppe Mazzini
We all know that the way we are living is not how we should and could be living. This thought—that life can and should be better—must never be abandoned. But we should remember this not just so that we can judge our present life, but so that we can bring about a better one. We must believe that life should be better than what it is at present, and we must live in a way that can make its improvement possible.
People often say: “Human beings are weak, you won’t become a saint, so don’t bother trying, just live like everyone else.” There is a great error in these words. We must try to live well not so that we become saints, but so that we become better than we were. This is everyone’s main task of life. And in this lies the good of every human being and all of humankind.
The ideal is within you. The barriers to achieving it are also within you. Your circumstances are the material from which you must realize that ideal.
— Carlyle
Perfection is only perfection when its realization is only possible in thought, when it seems attainable only in eternity and when the possibility of drawing nearer to it is therefore infinite.
The hope and belief that the good which we are conscious of will be realized both in us and in the world is the main condition for the possibility of its realization. To not believe in this, to think that we will always be just as bad as we are now, and that everyone will always live as badly as they do now is the main barrier to moving closer to its realization.
