Quotes About Striving

I've worked hard ever since I was that 18-year-old kid who travelled to South America and India to play small tournaments in the hope of cracking the top 200.

The travel book is a convenient metaphor for life, with its optimistic beginning or departure, its determined striving, and its reflective conclusion. Journeys change travellers just as a good travel book can change readers.

If you play a match, then you got to give it all to beat the opponent; there is nothing like playing against a great or a non-great player. I treat them all as opponents and aim to beat them.

If you are not trying to participate or win then you are trying to fail.

Try to be the best even if you can't be the best, you will be among the betters.

Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life.

The real risk is not changing. I have to feel that I'm after something. If I make money, fine. But I'd rather be striving. It's the striving, man, it's that I want.

I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn't. And that's a tough place to be because you're never satisfied.

We've been raised to compete, to want more! More! More! It's a way of life. It's about greed.

Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

God's children can feel driven to try to seem as if they never misbehave, taking very seriously the idea that they're to be as godlike as they can possibly will themselves to be.

Deep in midlife I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special; wanting to be better; wanting to experience every possible adventure in this life; wanting to be, as we have sometimes said at Kripalu, an "expanded self." Oh, for God's sake. It is just too damned much work to be an expanded self. Couldn't I just be an ordinary self?

Young Bran, striving to please and yearning for the approving touch of a father's hand, only ever saw that hand raised in anger. Thus, he learned at an early age that since he could never please his father, he might as well please himself.

It's no shame in reaching second or third base if you aimed for first base.

If you want more than what most have, then you must do far more than what it is they do.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

No man can become a saint in his sleep.

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

I am slightly fascinated by the question of whether humanity is capable of change. I may have come to the conclusion that we're not, but we keep trying.

I am passionate about keeping the human dimension in things. You have to keep the rough edges and the inconsistencies, that's what makes it interesting. I've always striven to be as sloppy as possible.

You can be a big fish in a small pond, but you're only going to be competing against people at that level.

If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes. Mark Twain1

No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement.