quotations about aspirations
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
ROBERT BROWNING
Andrea del Sarto
A good man, through obscurest aspirations,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Faust
The promise of aspiration is that it is evolutionary. The human condition is such that we are always aspiring to be something more, something better, something nobler. It starts as a thought, a want, a need, or a desire and then grows and evolves with intention and direction, upward with lust and hunger. The continued drive feeds the rise.
LORII MYERS
No Excuses
Who digs hills because they do aspire,
Throws down one mountain to cast up a higher.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pericles
Everyone holding a check pad is an aspiring something-else.
MANDY ASHCRAFT
Small Orange Fruit
I drink the wine of aspiration and the drug of illusion. Thus I am never dull.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Wine Horn Mountain
The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Religion for Atheists
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
He rises on the toe: that spirit of his
In aspiration lifts him from the earth.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
Yet was there surely then no vulgar power
Working within us--nothing less, in truth,
Than that most noble attribute of man,
That wish for something loftier, more adorned,
Than is the common aspect, daily garb,
Of human life.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The Prelude
Strong souls
Live like fire-hearted suns; to spend their strength
In furthest striving action.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.
KHALIL GIBRAN
The Madman
Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
There is not a heart but has its moments of longing--yearning for something better, nobler, holier than it knows now.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
I have immortal longings in me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Antony and Cleopatra
The human animal needs something to aspire to, somewhere to go and something to do.
JAMEY GLASNOVIC
Lost and Found: Adrift in the Canadian Rockies
Man is complete and upstanding only when he would be more than man.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
Life of Don Quixote
When aspirations are perceived to be achievable, ambition and drive can erase excuses.
LORII MYERS
No Excuses
In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"A Free Man's Worship"
Who shoots at the midday sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure he is he shall shoot higher than who aims but at a bush.
PHILIP SIDNEY
Arcadia