Often you have felt that you must cut down your ideals to match the seeming reality of life. But it is life that is to rise to your ideals. Your ideals are not mistaken. Keep them. Your ideals are to be lived.
When earth rises to Heaven then there will be no necessity for ideals. When you live your ideals, what then can be less?
Until earth reaches Heaven, you must have an ideal picture in mind. Your ideal is closer to the truth than all that the world temporarily calls reality. Do not dispossess yourself of ideals, for what hope lies in being realistic?
Know in your heart that ideals are good things to have. Do not forsake them. Ideals are not a trap to ensure that you meet disappointment. The lack of ideals is the trap. Ideals are something you must have. Ideals carry you forward and swing you high.
Keep your ideals or you are giving up on life, or giving in, and that is indeed a sacrifice. Your life is not meant to be a sacrifice. You need not cave in to ordinariness. The low road is not good enough for you. The middle road is not sufficient for you either.
You cannot fly on the ground. Glued to the ground, you are glued to the ground. Ideals are your takeoff. Ideals unglue you from where the world says you are and its saying there isn't anything else.
You are a pioneer of life on earth. Without ideals, what new territory would you forge? It is not so much that pioneers have courage. They have ideals. Their ideals are their courage. Their ideals give them something to be courageous about.
Without ideals, your scope is limited. To have greater vision, there has to be something you want to see.
When you are true to yourself, you will have ideals, and you will reach for them. Without ideals, what would you reach for? What less than ideals could possibly motivate you to branch out? Without ideals, you would not even know there was something more to reach for.
The span of your vision correlates with your ideals. You cannot be farseeing and only look close.
Practical and realistic only go so far. They do not go far enough.
What do you think following your heart means? It means following what is not yet obvious. Your dreams call you. Hear them and answer them.
You would agree that no one is the determiner of your life but you and I. And yet you might let the vision of the world stop you. You would let imaginary boundaries stop you in your tracks. You would hesitate to go above or around them, for to do so might mean you are looked at askance.
Would you sell your ideals for the momentary looks of a milling crowd? What kind of trade-off is that? Would you sell out Truth for scraps of paper or tinkling coins? What kind of price have you paid to deny yourself your role in the universe?
You are in the business of life. You need not be so accommodating to those who see only what has already transpired. Anyone can look behind himself and see the dust of the road. When you seek the horizon, it is the road ahead that you must traverse. Or the bridge. Or the rainbow.