Quotes
Quotes about Trying
What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.
What was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try to give their best qualities to menâbring them softness, teach them how to cry. -Joan Baez.
Be and not seem. A man is related to all nature. The less government we have the better. Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. To be great is to be misunderstood. Every man is in some way my superior. A man is a god in ruins. Life is a festival only to the wise. Knowledge is the only elegance. We boil at different degrees. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. What is the hardest thing in the world? To think. Accept your genius and say what you think. Make yourself necessary to somebody. The only way to have a friend is to be one. Insist on yourself; never imitate. Music causes us to think eloquently. To live without duties is obscene. It is not length of life, but depth of life. The greatest homage to truth is to use it. The only reward of virtue is virtue. Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. We become what we think about all day long. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. There is no knowledge that is not power. Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Heroism feels and never reasons and is therefore always right. A good indignation brings out all one's powers. A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect. Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Judge of your natural character by what you do in dreams. What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Our faith comes in moments, yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is merely through a transfer of idolatry. What lies beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age. Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of somebody's enthusiasm. It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us. This gives force to the strong - that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action. -U.S. Poet.
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk? - The Color Purple, 1982.
There is a penalty for trying to knock down a cockpit door, but it's the people who try to go from coach to 1st class they really beat up.
I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
I don't like giving names to generations. It's like trying to read the song title on a record that's spinning.
Failure does not count. If you accept this, you'll be successful. What causes most people to fail is that after one failure, they'll stop trying.
Christ didn't waste his time trying to change the social order. Christ spent all his time fighting sin. Therefore it behooves the witnesses of Christ to say that we do not have to abolish capitalism and establish socialism or communism, that sin can flourish under those systems as well. Christianity is not opposed to any social order, but to sin.
Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.
If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing.
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Frederick Buechner,'Whistling in the Dark' When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too of course, but at least for her it's a gradual process. Body and soul, she has nine months to get used to what's happening. She becomes what's happening. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once. On the other side of a plate-glass window, a nurse is holding up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see for the first time. Even if he should decide to abandon it forever ten minutes later, the memory will nag him to the grave. He has seen the creation of the world. It has his mark on it. He has its mark on him. Both marks are, for better or for worse, indelible. All sons, like all daughters, are prodigals if they're smart. Assuming the Old Man doesn't run out on them first, they will run out on him if they are to survive, and if he's smart he won't put up too much of a fuss. A wise father sees all this coming, and maybe that's why he keeps his distance from the start. He must survive too. Whether they ever find their way home again, none can say for sure, but it's the risk he must take if they're ever to find their way at all. In the meantime, the world tends to have a soft spot in its heart for lost children. Lost fathers have to fend for themselves. Even as the father lays down the law, he knows that someday his children will break it as they need to break it if ever they're to find something better than law to replace it. Until and unless that happens, there's no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose him and find themselves. Terrible blnders will be made-dissapointments and failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they'll keep making them even after they've found themselves too, of course, because growing up is a process that goes on and on. And every hard knock they ever get, knocks the father even harder still, if that's possible, and if and when they finally come through more or less in one piece at the end, there's maybe no rejoicing greater than his in all creation. -Fatherhood.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.
There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
I'm trying not to look too far ahead. All I'm thinking is one shot at a time, one hole at a time, and that's what I want to keep doing.
By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal misbehaviors using guns as a medical problem! Beam me up, Scotty. Ain't no intelligent life down here.
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -and both commonly succeed, and are right.
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature isâand why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
