Desire And Achievement Quotes & Sayings

If the Almighty in his mercy allows us to settle peace among the christian leaders, we shall press on not only to destroy completely the bad seeds, but also to expand the territories of Christ, and, supported by these achievements, we shall go forward, with God favouring his own purposes, to the most holy expedition against the infidels, the desire for which is deeply fixed in our heart. — Pope Leo X

Desire as a motivator for achievement and even for survival isn't a bad thing. It's when desire drives us to grab more than our share or harm others that issues arise. — Taite Adams

I love this constant motion between ' Solitude' and ' Loneliness '. On one end it's the desire and achievement of being alone ( glorious) on the other it's the utter despair and pain of being alone.. — Anubhav Mishra

A key ingredient to achieving your goals is to make sure your goals are totally congruent with who you are as a person. Your head and hearts desire must match. It's such an important step in goal achievement and if we miss it, we can end up travelling a long way down the wrong path! — Rachael Bermingham

Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it's the last that counts. A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. Fear to contradict myself! If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty. — Samuel Beckett

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous. — Lin Yutang

Desire something and don't just care what you have to go through to get it. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

There is, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Secondly, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige — Abraham Maslow

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such or so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. — Abraham H. Maslow

Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor
by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence
and every achievement is an expression of it. — Ayn Rand

So, no matter what your personal aspiration, it is important to articulate it and implant it firmly in your heart and mind. Determined mental and emotional focus will invariably manifest the achievement of your desire more quickly than anything else. — Dannion Brinkley

The press, that goiter of the world, swells up with the desire for conquest and bursts with the achievements which every day brings. A week has room for the boldest climax of the human drive for expansion. — Karl Kraus

Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs. — Randolph M. Nesse

He was puzzled by his mood. Despite the beauty of his surroundings, he found it curiously disconcerting. The art was almost too good to be true. What was it saying about humanity, and how much was the Renaissance culpable of creating the myth of individual rather than collective achievement? Was this the beginning of the desire for individual fame and recognition that contradicted Christian humility and shared responsibility; licensing the modern notion of ambition and selfish aspiration? On — James Runcie

He lost, for that moment, all the days and dogmas of his past; his concepts, his problems, his pain were wiped out; he knew only - as from a great, clear distance - that man exists for the achievement of his desires, and he wondered why he stood here, he wondered who had the right to demand that he waste a single irreplaceable hour of his life, when his only desire was to seize the slender figure in gray and hold her through the length of whatever time there was left for him to exist. — Ayn Rand

Unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow-men, never showing impatience or irritation, devoid of personal ambition of the baser sort or of the slightest desire to exalt himself ... In the minds of those who knew him, the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life.
[H.A. Burnstead's comments on the life of esteemed scientist J. Willard Gibbs] — Henry Andrews Bumstead

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! — Peter Shaffer

When people hate, its power engulfs them and they are totally consumed by it ... Keep struggling against hatred and resentment. At times you will have the upper hand, at times you will feel beaten down. Although it is extremely difficult, never let hatred completely overtake you ... Never stop trying to live the commandment of love and forgiveness. Do not dilute the strength of Jesus's message; do not shun it; do not dismiss it as unreal and impractical. Do not cut it to your size, trying to make it more applicable to real life in the world. Do not change it so that it will suit you. Keep it as it is, aspire to it, desire it, and work for its achievement — Anonymous

Each being in the universe, therefore, inhabits a private world. It is as if the universe were populated by countless cinemas, each occupied by a single person, each eternally viewing a different film projected by consciousness, each eternally suspending disbelief. For the Yogacara, ignorance and suffering result from believing the movie to be real, from mistaking the projections to be an external world, from thinking that what appear to be external objects are independent of consciousness, and then running after them, desiring some and hating others. For the Yogacara, wisdom is the insight that everything is of the nature of consciousness and the product of one's own projections. With this insight, desire and hatred, attachment and aversion, naturally cease, for their objects are seen to be illusions. With the achievement of enlightenment, the substratum consciousness is transformed into the mirror like wisdom of a buddha. — Donald Lopez

Some are born with knowledge, some derive it from study, and some acquire it only after a painful realization of their ignorance.
But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing.
Some study with a natural ease, some from a desire for advantages, and some by strenuous effort.
But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing. — Confucius

Let your desire for truth transcend all minor considerations. Ignorance is invariably confident. The man of knowledge learns to realize his own needs. Be honest and severe in your self-appraisal. Learn the art of learning, and you are well on the way to achievement. True greatness is reflective, not assertive. — Grenville Kleiser

Add to this the pride of achievement; the desire to rank among the successful souls on earth, and we have the factors which have brought some of the ablest of human beings into the limelight that revealed them to an admiring world, as leaders and examples. — Lewis Howard Latimer

To be a great achiever you must have a desire, a will to live and determination to push through no matter what. — Euginia Herlihy

If you are serious about your goals and you truly desire to achieve your dreams, you must write them down. — John Patrick Hickey

The animals have desire, or appetite. But only humans have the ability not merely to desire things, but also the creative will to take responsibility for that desire and bring about the achievement of it. That creative ability resides in the nature of God, and he has passed it on to us. — Henry Cloud

When relying solely on ego, we are given many messages that are contrary to the achievement of that happy and fulfilling life that most of us actually desire. — Taite Adams

What the mind can conceive and believe, and the heart desire, you can achieve. — Norman Vincent Peale

I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of "Ironia, which we call the drye mock." And I cannot think of a better term for it: The drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement. — Robertson Davies

Needs cause motivation. Deep-rooted desires for esteem, affection, belonging, achievement, self-actualization, power, and control motivate us to push for what we want and need in our lives. — Lorii Myers

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired. — Martha Graham

Desire is the key to your achievement and to your destiny. — Euginia Herlihy

In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. — Robert Greene

A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.' (1923) — J. Gresham Machen

Motive lies behind action. It is the root of behaviour and attitude, the fuel we need to progress from desire to achievement. In our humanity we are driven to survive, and to be loved makes the living worthwhile. — Sarah Tun

I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect. Decedents of the beautiful women that fought so hard for centuries to be equal and not objects of men's will, only their achievement to die in vain. As today's woman single desire is to be any men's object by any means on her part. Talk about irony ... — Irena Deneva

There is no desire that anyone holds for any other reason than that they believe they will feel better in the achievement of it. Whether it is a material object, a physical state of being, a relationship, a condition, or a circumstance - at the heart of every desire is the desire to feel good. And so, the standard of success in life is not the things or the money - the standard of success is absolutely the amount of joy you feel. — Esther Hicks

Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating. — Chaz Brenchley