Quotes About Striving

Winds sweep the summits, envy seeks the heights.

All human culture is but an attempt at something unattainable, something which far transcends our powers of realization. There it stands, mutilated, tragic as a torso. Is not the human spirit itself a torso?

He thought about the highest and holiest in life and of what nature it might be: that perhaps it exists only as a dream and cannot survive reality, the awakening. But that it does nevertheless exist. That perfect love exists and the Holy Land exists; it is just that we cannot reach it.

Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.

And grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.

Christians certainly aren't perfect. There will always be need for improvement. But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being "just forgiven" as that is nowadays understood. You could be much more than forgiven and still not be perfect.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.

As a result, he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away

Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things," said Odysseus. "Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one's life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.

Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.

For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.

If you don't try, you will not succeed. This is true for of all things. Not succeeding is the result of not trying.

Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for.

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.   In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.   In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

He could never be happy; as an obsessive perfectionist, perfection would always stay tantalizingly out of reach

He wondered at the way in which all man's petty striving seemed insignificant in this place, in this vast primeval world—and suddenly he thought that if all men, even those who had known nothing but the crowded ratlike scrambling of the cities, could be set down in this place, even for a brief space of time, then they might return to their lives cleansed and refreshed, their subsequent strivings might become less vicious, more attuned to the eternal groundswell of nature.

To be happy, one must be as ignorant as youth. Youth thinks that willing and striving are joys; it has not yet discovered the weary insatiableness of desire, and the fruitlessness of fulfilment; it does not yet see the inevitableness of defeat.

struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.