Quotes About Aspiration

It's okay to give up on a dream. The majority of dreams don't come true. Our whole country is learning as much.

But what kind of profession is this, writer?" my mother would ask. "You want to be this?" I want to be this.

And between them I am rosy cheeked, aflame with health and joy. I am still the owner of the same stupid Soviet polka-dot shirt, but most of it is hidden by a new Italian sweater, its shoulders ringed with something like epaulets, so that I may continue the fantasy that I will join the Red Army someday. My hair is as long and unruly as the Italian state, and the gap between my crooked teeth is its own opera, but the rings under my eyes that have made such an underaged raccoon out of me are gone.

All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar

Wherever your path takes you, may all your deathbed wishes come true, and may you celebrate each and every one of them many long years before your final breath.

For years I had known joy in nothing but victories, and now I felt myself a boy again. When I had wished to climb the Great Keep, it had never occurred to me that the Great Keep itself might wish to climb the sky; I knew better now. But this ship at least was climbing beyond the sky, and I wanted to climb with her.

I was young, so that I desired high things only.

Each time you gain your hearts desire, your heart shall reach for something higher.

She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most appealing of all human qualities

I had learned in the intervening time the folly of limiting desire to the possible.

For no man lives long when his dreams are dead.

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do.

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

It is this final goal - freedom - toward which all the world's history has been working. It is this goal to which all the sacrifices have been brought upon the broad altar of the earth in the long flow of time.

Everybody has choices, Mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between rag-picking and flower-selling, according to her taste. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

Getting over an unfavorable impression is ever so much easier than living up to an ideal.

Some men dream of things as they are and say; Why? I dream of things that never were and say; Why not?

The real slavery of to-day is slavery to ideals of virtue.

I'm not a person who thinks they can have it all, but I certainly feel that with a bit of effort and guile I should be able to have more than my fair share.

I wanted to get a job as a gynecologist, but I couldn't find an opening.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.