Quotes About Aspiration

for those at the bottom of the ladder,

Un jour vient où vous manque une seule chose et ce n'est pas l'objet de votre désir, c'est le désir.

A cathedral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

A catherdral, a wave of storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.

Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

loopholes opened by disappointment. Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.

they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

And ignominie, yet to glorie aspires   Vain glorious, and through infamie seeks fame:   Therfore Eternal silence be thir doome.

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.

I thence invoke my thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

pain, that with ambitious mind 35: Will covet more.

Yet some there be that by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the palace of Eternity. To such my errand is

People must seek many things to make their lives significant.

So then, men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object.

Just because we are something better than birds or bees, our buildings must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine, and can not rest in the condition we have attained. If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded either ourselves or our work.

The plan is not the goal.

I'm trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. A nice thing to wonder about when you're thirty.

It's easier to be the aspirational leader when the thing you're building doesn't exist. But now it exists, and you're not aspirational anymore. Now you're just the chief bureaucrat. Bureaucrats don't inspire awe.

It was nice when you could look up to your parent, even as an adult, and think, This is who I fucking want to be when I grow up.