Quotes About Pursuit

If, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.

Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?" "Good God, no!" "Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.

The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions–if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too–he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts.

So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.

What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to…how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. (And yes, I'm including high school.)

where?" he asked. "TO THE

His gal had thrown down, and he was going to follow her wherever that led.

Tatsu had pursued me for years, but more recently we had managed to achieve an improbable entente.

She's a bargirl. You don't know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me—I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn't needed to warn me about the bugs. My gut told me she wasn't dissembling.

But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual's pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if "constraint" sometimes affords a kind of liberation while "freedom" affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.

She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

Passive men wait for knowledge to come to them. Weak men assume what they need to know will seek them out. Men of great character and drive search out the knowledge they need.

There is no real excellence

everything that passes unattempted is impossible." At

A glory that costs everything and means nothing.

The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say "I don't know"—and then follow up, certainly, with "but maybe I can find out." And work as hard as you can to do that. You may be surprised by how receptive people are to your confession, especially when you come through with the real answer a day or a week later.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (a.k.a. Hannibal the Cannibal) taunts his pursuer by saying, "I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner.

Recall that intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles.

The penultimate chapter will lay out how some of today's florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.