Life Aspiring Quotes & Sayings

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life
the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes
ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases. — Tom Bissell

Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet! - that one strives, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. — Herman Melville

Can it be, thought I, that my sole mission on earth is to destroy the hopes of others? Ever since I began to live and act, fate has somehow associated me with the last act of other people's tragedies, as if without me no one could either die or give way to despair! I have been the inevitable character who comes in at the final act, involuntarily playing the detestable role of the hangman or the traitor. What has been fate's object in all this? Has it destined me to be the author of middle-class tragedies and family romances
or a purveyor of tales for, say, the Reader's Library? Who knows? Are there not many who begin life by aspiring to end it like Alexander the Great, or Lord Byron, and yet remain petty civil servants all their lives? — Mikhail Lermontov

Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth. — James E. Lovelock

Mastering the art of asking questions is essential to creativity and innovation. A More Beautiful Question should be standard reading for all aspiring design thinkers as well an inspiration to those searching for a life of curiosity and meaning. — Tim Brown

Make your life an inspiring story meant to be read in bed during a sleepless night of despair. — Debasish Mridha

We need spirited, energetic and strong young people whose hearts are filled with life, enthusiasm, zeal and dynamism; whose souls are full of ambition, aspiration and vigor and have great goals, rising and aspiring to reach them until they eventually arrive at their destination. — Hassan Al-Banna

I'm not an aspiring rapper, I'm not a gang member, I'm not a dope dealer, I don't have multiple babies momma's. I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member, I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me. I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North. I didn't need the US Navy to instill Honor, Courage, and Commitment in me but I thank them for re-enforcing it. It's in my DNA. — Christopher Dorner

When one is young, aspiring to play for the country, doing well, any hindrance, like injury or being out of form, can be frustrating and a cause of annoyance or even anger. But once you have a close encounter with death, you realise the real value of life. — Yuvraj Singh

Through memory to knowledge on the way to stars that are stepping down to the stuffy rooms of modern bureaucrats, illuminating their ceilings, their horizons where everything is easily resolved by the piles of paper and recipes for how to live, create, run, eat, breathe, learn how to love, how to make love, how to sleep, how to dream, how happiness is achieved under the artificial stars of the new sky that emerged from the bureaucratic rooms of aspiring and impotent minds, unable to love, even though they had all their life to learn what they preach. — Dejan Stojanovic

And health in art - what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in [Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the limitations of the form in which he works. It is the honour and the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories - knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The delight is like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring. — Oscar Wilde

The tragedy of Tupac is that his untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country....If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler named Detroit Red. And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer--just a sliver of my eventual life potential. — Quincy Jones

Life waits patiently for true heroes. It is dangerous when those aspiring to be heroes cannot wait until they find themselves. — Thich Nhat Hanh

His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for - leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power - as in the case of Increase Mather - was within the grasp of a successful priest. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
— Jim Harrison

I have a friend, an aspiring musician, whose sister said to her one day, quite reasonably, "What happens if you never get anything out of this? What happens if you pursue your passion forever, but success never comes? How will you feel then, having wasted your entire life for nothing?" My friend, with equal reason, replied, "If you can't see what I'm already getting out of this, then I'll never be able to explain it to you." When it's for love, you will always do it anyhow. — Elizabeth Gilbert

By believing your work is a 'gift,' it radically changes what you create. I think this is a revolutionary idea. It's no longer about client approval or a paycheck, but aspiring to make work that has meaning and purpose in your life and for your audience. — James Victore

Mom also believed that there is such a thing as a good secret. Maybe something kind you did for someone but didn't want that person to know, because you didn't want him to be embarrassed or feel as though he owed you anything. I thought back to a Harvard student of Mom's, an aspiring playwright who won an award to travel in Europe - but the award didn't exist. Mom had simply paid, anonymously, for him to have enough money to go on what turned out to be a life-changing trip. I write about this only because I was told that years later this fellow figured it all out, when he went to research who else had won this lucrative traveling fellowship and discovered that the answer was no one. As — Will Schwalbe

Peace is something tangible. It silences the outgoing energy of the mind and feeds the aspiring heart. Peace is not merely the absence of quarreling and fighting. True peace is not affected by the roaring of the world, outer or inner. This sea of peace is at our command if we practise the spiritual life. — Sri Chinmoy

I'm not an aspiring young actor; I'm a storyteller who made it late in life, and I'm therefore an inspiration to everyone who thinks that, at 23, if you're not in the Backstreet Boys, then you're never gonna make it. — Paul Hogan

As a kid I would always be in my bedroom constantly staring at the same four pink walls in it, aspiring to do all of these things. I had big dreams, and my dreams were bigger than what my life was at the time. I didn't understand why my life wasn't more interesting, but I was so oblivious to life outside of my bedroom because I was always there. I had to go about living my dreams. — Alessia Cara

It doesn't really matter in the end. Most people I talk to don't take writing seriously. If I tell them I'm an aspiring author, they get that "yeah right" look on their face, which is usually followed by "good luck with that. — Karina Halle

(From FORTUNE'S SON)
Philip had long ago begun drinking to excess, simply to obliterate the reality that he was half a man, living half a life. He had a title without the fortune, a wife that was no lover, and a lover, the only light in his darkened existence, who could never be his wife; thus, he drank ... drink and despair had made him reckless and rash. He'd gambled and he'd lost. Sunk in self-denigration, the cycle began anew; he drank.
Though aspiring for oblivion, he had only achieved piss-faced, when Lady Hastings had arrived after the race. The inevitable row had ensued, and then the world had retracted into blessed blackness. — Emery Lee

The primary challenge for any aspiring public office bearer is to have a well-defined cause and diligently represent that cause until a significant impact is witnessed. Adhering to value-based leadership principles must be at the top of the priority list for public office aspirants. — Archibald Marwizi

In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities. — Ari Ne'eman

What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man. — Don DeLillo

Thus, Marlowe posed the silent question: could aspiring Icarus be happy with a toilsome life on land managing a plough with plodding oxen having once tasted the weightless bliss of flight? — E.A. Bucchianeri

The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life, are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies. — Edward Gibbon

With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome. — Edward Carpenter

How great inexperience and innocence is. On the authority of their parents they go to a place where they could meet their death; for the Zirder in flood is very dangerous and, given the ignorance of the children, can be incalculably dangerous. But they know nothing of death. Even if they speak its name, they do not know its essence and their aspiring life has no feeling for annihilation. If they were on the brink of death themselves, they would not know it and they would die before they found it out. — Adalbert Stifter

Thus the brave and aspiring life of one man lights a flame in the minds of others of like faculties and impulse; and where there is equally vigorous effort, like distinction and success will almost surely follow. Thus the chain of example is carried down through time in an endless succession of links
admiration exciting imitation, and perpetuating the true aristocracy of genius. — Samuel Smiles

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

Thinking is an action. For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together. The heartbeat of critical thinking is the longing to know - to understand how life works. Children are organically predisposed to be critical thinkers. Across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and circumstance, children come into the world of wonder and language consumed with a desire for knowledge. Sometimes they are so eager for knowledge that they become relentless interrogators - demanding — Bell Hooks

I've been very, very lucky in my career, in my life - from day one. When aspiring directors say, 'What's your advice?' first I say, 'Be born the son of a famous director. It's invaluable.' — Jason Reitman

Lessons of Life: When you stop yearning, When you stop aspiring. You stop living. — Shekhar Kapur

I have tried to devote my life - with all my husband failures, father failures, pastor failures, friend failures, any other possible failures I'm sure I've done them - to the God-centeredness of God and my aspiring, yearning to join Him in that activity. God is passionate about hallowing the name of God. — John Piper

Surround yourself with those who are moving very quickly towards Unity. Be in the presence of those who are running forward. Besides the knowledge the Veda, the greatest thing we can do is be surrounded by those who are living and seeking the highest value of life, Brahmi Chetana. This is why yogic flying with groups is so much greater than flying alone. To live and work with others who are moving and aspiring fast towards Unity consciousness is the great force to help you achieve Unity. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Homer was wrong," wrote Heracleitus of Ephesus. "Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away." These are the words on which the superhumanists should meditate. Aspiring toward a consistent perfection, they are aspiring toward annihilation. The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife. — Aldous Huxley