Aspirational Quotes & Sayings

If you can connect all the dots between what you see today and where you want to go, then it's probably not ambitious enough or aspirational enough. — Shantanu Narayen

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one — Aaron Sorkin

President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And that's what we need most in our country today. — Anna Deavere Smith

There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things. — Eli Pariser

FedEx is another company that's passionate. When it absolutely, positively has to get there is such a great, aspirational phrase. And FedEx used it for almost a decade to communicate the passion of delivering a package. The more passionate you are, the more successful you are. — Frank Luntz

As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic - full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it. — Wendy Brown

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you. — Marina Abramovic

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we? — Hugh Laurie

I think that the reason for my success is that I am really not aspirational. I am inspirational in that the people at home feel like they can really relate to me. — Rosie O'Donnell

There's a constant anxiety that comes from having an innate sense of self, yet existing within a homogenised, aspirational culture. — Autre Ne Veut

Try not to be in a hurry to get older because youth happens once in your life. Thereafter, old age stays with you forever. — Chris Jirika

We are an aspirational society. We believe that circumstances of your birth do not determine your outcome. You shouldn't have to be born to wealthy parents or the right zip code to be successful and do great things in our country! — Bobby Jindal

I think Detroit would do real well if we started repopulating it with young, aspirational people. — Jeb Bush

I grew up in a makeup chair. And to see the women around me getting ready was so aspirational. It's about mothers and daughters, a girl watching her mom at a vanity table. — Drew Barrymore

Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less. — Maria Popova

When success begins to slip from your fingers - for whatever reason - the response isn't to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It's to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices. — Ryan Holiday

We teach aspirational ethics. What I teach my students is, You're born heroic. I go into these animal studies, and heroism is actually in our nature. What you have to do is make sure that the system doesn't change you, that our educational system doesn't teach you to be willfully blind and to forget your aspirations, because that's the default position. — Marc Edwards

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love). — Steven D. Levitt

I don't think people look at how pop stars live and feel anything aspirational at all. — Lorde

So, let us, you and I, for the sake of our brother man, individually strive by example and influence to lift the standard of thought and conduct from the low level of selfishness and self-indulgence up to the lofty realms of aspirational thought and self-denial. — Ossian Everett Mills

Chic, is first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants. — Luca Turin

My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it. — Jerry Saltz

We lie to reflect the aspirational goals that we unconsciously know we will not uphold. — Cortney S. Warren

If you look at the economics of Nokia, roughly half of the company, half of the business, half of how we think about the business is focused on those emerging markets and on those lower-priced devices. But, of course, people who are aspirational and buying those lower-priced devices today are looking at smart phones tomorrow, and so forth. — Stephen Elop

Do you know what is our problem? We know everything about our weapons, but we know nothing about how to use a telephone. — Asne Seierstad

Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association. — Grayson Perry

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name - fear - need - dependence - hatred? — Ayn Rand

Fashion is about affordable luxury ... To succeed, designers need to be affordable, wearable, accessible, and aspirational. — Tommy Hilfiger

there is no creature more empathetic toward those who suffer social injustice, more compelled by optimism and faith in humankind, or more aspirational in her beliefs than a middle schooler. — Michelle Icard

Nothing boosts confidence quite like simulating a disaster, engaging with it fully, both physically and intellectually, and realising you have the ability to work the problem. — Chris Hadfield

Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working-class were are on the wrong side of history - and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us. — Owen Jones

One chair upon another is pornographic. Ten in a stack is aspirational. I made so many mistakes on purpose just to get them out of the way. One cannot convince another to love anything or anyone. Better than arguing is just pointing and saying Look at that. I've — Sarah Manguso

Too many books are full of recipes that aren't doable at home. They are purely aspirational. They are quite frightening, even for me. — Yotam Ottolenghi

In the next decade, I see Spanx going worldwide. Everywhere. No butt left behind. It's going to be all over the world and it's going to be an aspirational brand that transcends categories. There's so many things we can improve upon and make better. — Sara Blakely

Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don't want it to be. — Paloma Faith

Because I was aspirational, I did my work, I was respectful to my teachers, I experienced a lot of bullying from the black kids. My friends were largely white or Asian. — David Oyelowo

Love is recreational, it needs not be aspirational — Jay McInerney

I invite you to open your mind to new possibilities. Let's fake it till we make it. Let's create visions of an aspirational future. You don't have to quit your job. But think about what might change your trajectory by half a degree. It could be that when you come home every night your first words are "I'm home! How can I help?" Try doing that. You may have a shitty job. You don't like it. You do it for the money, even if the money isn't great. Try to look at your work in a different way. Find something about your life that's great. Follow that thread. Volunteer. Even if you're in the worst possible situation, there's hope. Challenge yourself. Set your own bar. Redefine your success metrics. Create opportunities for yourself. Reassess your situation. We are all marching together. We're headed toward something big, and it's going to be good. — Biz Stone

She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper. — Gillian Flynn

Carey Mulligan and Felicity Jones are two of my favorites. I'm not so much younger than them. I like that. It's kind of aspirational. — Daisy Ridley

1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won't get "the best education possible," which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school. 2. — Maria Semple

Am I conservative? Yes, I am. I would have thought conservative is very much middle of the road, representative of the aspirational values of the Australian people. The extreme right has connotations with it that I would never seek to identify with. — Eric Abetz

What the United States needs is for a unifying, positive, aspirational force to sweep through our national community. American conservatives have a generational opportunity to become precisely this kind of force. We have a shot, if we take it, to help every single American build a better life, and unite our nation in the process. — Arthur C. Brooks

It is better to illuminate than merely to shine.
Maius est illuminare quam lucere solum. — Thomas Aquinas

I like to think I set aspirational but reasonable goals and encourage my team to achieve them. — Sheri McCoy

There's a certain je ne sais quoi that Americans have in spades - a we-can-do-anything spirit that makes so many things possible for all of us. We're rugged individualists, aspirational in nature, and we like to think for ourselves. — Marianne Williamson

We're never going to scare people into living more sustainably! We have to be able to demonstrate just how dynamic and aspirational such a world could be — Jonathon Porritt

When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names. This — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mediocrity has become something that's acceptable," Keller says, "and in many cases, something that is aspirational." To — Dan Charnas

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn't. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law. — John Connolly

Global warming will threaten our crops, so natural food will be scarce. Hourglass, curvy bodies will be the aspirational beauty standard, representing that those women have access to bounties of fulfilling yet healthy food, which means they are affluent. — Tyra Banks

A lillion miles of journey starts with a foot stamp — Oladosu Feyikogbon

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace. — Virginia Postrel

Kids aren't growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas. — Kevin Spacey

Try to turn as many soft, aspirational goals as possible into success criteria, and make them specific enough that you can actually tell whether or not you've met them. — Erin Kissane

British audiences tend to want to see their own lives reflected on TV, whereas American audiences are quite aspirational and enjoy high-concept shows that show them lives that are perhaps slightly more exciting than they aspire to. — Adam Rayner

Separation is the first cause of inequality. — Katy Tackes

but racism is about the power of a group and in America it's white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don't get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don't get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don't give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don't stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don't choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don't tell white kids that they're not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don't try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can't use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered "aspirational" by the "mainstream." So — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

New media is ... an amazing form of direct marketing in that you really get a sense of who your customer is, and you also get to know those people who may not be your customers yet but are aspirational and are hoping to be. — Ivanka Trump

I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it's the most aspirational diet because it's so easy. It's quite simple, the cooking I do. — Vivienne Westwood

What makes America great was a government that was founded to be limited to doing one thing. I really believe the whole purpose of America, the aspirational value - why everybody who wants to come to this country wants to come here - was because we respected the dignity of every living person. — Rick Santorum

My whole life as a grammar-school boy, getting to Cambridge University and working on the 'London Sunday Times' has been very aspirational. — Robert Lacey

Ryan Chase was my eighth-grade collage, aspirational and wide-eyed. But Max was the first bite of grilled cheese on a snowy day, the easy fit of my favorite jeans, that one old song that made it onto every playlist. Peanut-butter Girl Scout cookies instead of an ornate cake. Not glamorous or idealized or complicated. Just me. — Emery Lord

Brand is not a product, that's for sure; it's not one item. It's an idea, it's a theory, it's a meaning, it's how you carry yourself. It's aspirational, it's inspirational. — Kevin Plank

I love New York, but it's a rough city. It's not dangerous now the way it was in the 70's or the 80's, but it's still a rough city. It's hard to hack it there. Life is harder than it is on the West Coast. To be able to deal with that, you have to have a lot of aspirational feelings pinned on being there. — Greta Gerwig

You know that gap between where you are and where you'd like to be? Within that gap, there is an ache and an aspirational leap, which is very good for writing. — Amanda Harlech

We could retell our stories and make them better, more representational or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance. — Jonathan Safran Foer

An aspirational diet will have you dreaming of success; but it's the attachment of expectations and tangible goals that feeds the desire, persistence, and fortitude required to make the win. — Lorii Myers

I never wanted to live a relatable life, I wanted to live an aspirational life. I didn't want to see people who had my life on TV. I wanted to see other lives, right, and so I was always trying to get as much of that stuff as I could. — George Stroumboulopoulos

How do Mercedes Parents think? My research indicates the following:
1. The choice of private schools is both fear-based and aspirational. Mercedes Parents are afraid their children won't "the best education possible," Which has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the number of other Mercedes Parents at a school. — Maria Semple