Quotes About Aspiration

What happens when you're comfortable is that you end up getting deeper and deeper into a "good" life that prevents you from living a great life and accomplishing what you really dream about.

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.

Let your life be guided by greatness

The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.

I think what everyone should be doing, before it's too late, is committing themselves to what they really want to do with their lives.

We're growing up, Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except to try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. I'd like to be a fine one, Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

After Commencement Day, the world! Joe said. With Betsy.

We're growing up, Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it wasn't irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try and see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. I'd like to be a fine one, Betsy thought quickly and urgently.

My final word: don't follow your dreams . . . chase them. With a stick, or a shovel, or whatever you have handy. Get that [bleep]ing dream!

I could pretend, at least, and if I pretended long enough, maybe I could make it into a reality.

I get to live by myself in a tree, doing some bullshit job for no one? This is my dream, Stevie. This is my dream.

Day or two. Got a bunch of it from The West Wing. That was the only show I was never allowed to watch when I was a kid, so it's my favorite. I wonder who my dad will have as VP if he gets into the White House? I'm rooting for a cloud of bats. What about you, Stevie? You know him better than I do.

The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest--and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God--and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form....

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

It [Romanticism] is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to—oh, stop it!

The status was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.

so you see, Roark though it is to be a religious edifice, it is also more than that. you notice that we call it the temple of the human spirit. We want to capture- in stone, as others capture in music- not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. and what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. the great life giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit.

You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I--I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.

I, I am the day after tomorrow.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.