Quotes About Striving

Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we're done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.

As we're about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don't fit the societal norms we've created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we're working so hard to solve.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. It is not a harsh, straining, desperate effort but, rather, an ardent and wholehearted remembrance of our capacity for freedom. Right Effort is willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, and to let go of our preconceptions.

That ruin is beautiful," he declared, and added: "But it is more than this, it is emblematic also.… Is it not in some respects an image of the human soul, once ruined by the fall, yet with gleams of beauty and energetic striving after strength, surrounded by dangers and watching, against its foes?

She went searching for her dreams, and she didn't find them, but she made the attempt.

Will we ever understand the price of ambition, or ever apply our heart to life with submission?

Anything in life worth working for, is worth praying for.

The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life.

There's life alone in duty done, And rest alone in striving.

Perfection is worth striving for, even if it is ultimately unattainable in this life.

I've been in a competitive situation almost all my life. I've been having a competition with myself and trying to be the best I could be.

We cannot be satisfied with things as they are. We cannot be satisfied to drift, to rest on our oars, to glide over a sea whose depths are shaken by subterranean upheavals.

the wends n. the frustration that you're not enjoying an experience as much as you should, even something you've worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in various thought combinations to try for anything more than static emotional blankness, as if your heart had been accidentally demagnetized by a surge of expectations.

I wouldn't have told this to a soul back then, but as early as my first Wimbledon in '77, I realized I had the potential to be the very best: the best tennis player in the world. I confirmed it for myself as I rose through the rankings—but then, more and more, the problem became that almost everybody was somebody I shouldn't lose to. The pressure became incomprehensible.

Everything that happens is only a searching and striving to return to equilibrium ... back to paradise!

If you want sucess,you must pursue it.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals. It's who we are when nobody is looking.

People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.

It's only the immortal thing that a man can be judged on, that bit of himself that he makes as he does the best he can with what fate handed out to him.

for Aristotle the world we make for ourselves continually reflects that constant striving toward improvement. In that sense, Aristotle is the first great advocate of progress—and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.21

Thou shalt not covet, but traditionApproves all forms of competition.