Quotations about:
    aspiration

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years “Be successful, be successful, be successful” as opposed to “Be great, be great, be great”. There’s a qualitative difference.

Cornel West (b. 1953) American philosopher, political activist, social critic

“Democracy Matters,” speech, San Francisco (1 Oct 2004)

My theory has always been that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter than the gloom of despair.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American political philosopher, polymath, statesman, US President (1801-09)

Letter to François de Marbois (14 Jun 1817)
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I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.

Grant Morrison (b. 1960) Scottish comic book writer and playwright

“All Star Memories: Grant Morrison on All Star Superman, Part 1,” Interview with Zack Smith, Newsarama.com (21 Oct 2008)
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All’s well that ends well. Still the fine’s the crown.
Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet

All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, sc. 4, l. 39ff [Helena] (1602?)
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Humanity will ever seek but never attain perfection. Let us at least survive and go on trying.

Dora, Countess Russell (1894-1986) British author, feminist, social activist [Dora Russell, née Black]

The Religion of the Machine Age (1983)

I don’t believe there is any finer mission on earth than just to make people laugh.

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887-1933) American silent film actor, comedian, director, screenwriter

“Fatty Off Guard,” interview by Elizabeth Sears (1916)
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What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

Mignon McLaughlin (1913-1983) American journalist and author

The Neurotic’s Notebook, ch. 5 (1963)
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Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet

“Table-Talk”
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Don’t be yourself — be someone a little nicer.

Mignon McLaughlin (1913-1983) American journalist and author

The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, ch. 4 (1966)
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I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) Algerian-French novelist, essayist, playwright

The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942)

Go we seek that we shall not find.

Thomas Malory (c. 1415-1471) English writer

Le Morte d’Arthur, Book 16, ch. 2 (1485)
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Ector to Lancelot (or vice versa) in Ector's dream. Often paraphrased/modernized to "We shall now seek that which we shall not find."

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

[Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil.]

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Roman orator, statesman, philosopher

Epistulae ad Familiares [Letters to Friends], Book 9, Letter 4 “To Varro” (9.4) (46-45 BC)

In June 708 AUC. Sometimes rendered "nihil deerit."

Alt. trans.: "If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete." [Source].

Original Latin in context.

To be a writer is to accept failure as a profession — which of us is Dante or Shakespeare? — and could they return, wouldn’t they fall at once to revising, knowing they could make the work better? In our own dwarfed way, we are trying for something like perfection, knowing it is unachievable (except of course that trying and failing is a better way of living than not trying).

John Ciardi (1916-1986) American poet, writer, critic

In Vince Clemente, “‘A Man Is What He Does With His Attention’: A Conversation with John Ciardi,” Poesis, Vol. 7 #2 (1986)
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Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we’d had.

Louise Hart (contemp.) American educator, psychologist, author, speaker

The Winning Family, ch. 1, epigraph (1987)

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) American writer

“Inventory,” Life (11 Nov 1926)
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Reprinted in Enough Rope (1926).

The universe could have been created ugly, and would have functioned. And yet there is beauty everywhere in creation. Beauty gives us an ache, to be worthy of that creation.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet

Comments at Wellesley College (20 Oct 2010)
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The last phrase is frequently paraphrased, "We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it."

Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations. There were people who said, “You can’t go into space. You can’t go to the moon.” If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out. Yes, you can hear other people’s wisdom, but you’ve got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.

Mae Jemison (b. 1956) American engineer, physician, astronaut

Interview, Chicago Sun-Times (May 1994)
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It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

Paulo Coelho (b. 1947) Brazilian spiritual writer

The Alchemist, ch. 1 (1988)
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If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.

Muhammad Ali (b. 1942) American boxer [b. Cassius Clay]

(Attributed)

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

“The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs” (1878)
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Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet

“Table-Talk”
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What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) German-American psychologist, writer

Man’s Search for Meaning, Part 2 (1946)
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I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet

“Starlings in Winter”
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It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) Welsh author and mystic

The Hill of Dreams, ch. 5 (1907)
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I’m working at trying to be a good Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy — it’s serious business. It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) American poet, memoirist, activist [b. Marguerite Ann Johnson]

“The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, #116, Interview with George Plimpton (1990)
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Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.

Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, ch. 4 (2009)
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author

The Consolations of Philosophy, ch. 4 “Consolation for Inadequacy” (2000)
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Summarizing Montaigne.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition.

Barack Obama (b. 1961) American politician, US President (2009-2017)

Commencement Address, Knox College, Galesburg, IL (4 Jun 2005)
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Ambition hath one heel nailed in hell, though she stretch her finger to touch the heavens.

John Lyly (c. 1553-1606) was an English writer [also Lilly or Lylie]

Midas: A Comedy, Act 2, sc. 1 [Sophronia] (1592)
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Sometimes misquoted as "nailed in well." Sometimes misattributed to Lao-tzu.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to “jump at de sun.” We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) American writer, folklorist, anthropologist

Dust Tracks on a Road, ch. 2 “My Folks” (1942)
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… a noble aim,
Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed,
In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) English poet

“Brave Schill! By Death Delivered, Take Thy Flight” (1809; pub. 1815)
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Sometimes misquoted "is a noble deed".

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747) French moralist, essayist, soldier

Reflections and Maxims [Réflexions et maximes], #562 [tr. Stevens] (1746)
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A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man by one which is lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other, ambition. Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) American clergyman and orator

Life Thoughts (1858)
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Sometimes misattributed to Marcus Aurelius.

It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) South African revolutionary, politician, statesman

Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.

Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) American football coach

(Attributed)

Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.

Phillips Brooks (1835-1893) American clergyman, hymnist

Daily Thoughts from Phillips Brooks (1893)

Do you remember the ’60s and ’70s? You didn’t have to go more than a week before there was an article in Life magazine — “The Home of Tomorrow,” “The City of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow.” All that ended. In the 1970s, after we stopped going to the Moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming. And so I worry that decisions that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow’s gone. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, and the rest of the world is going to pass us by.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (b. 1958) American astrophysicist, author, orator

Real Time with Bill Maher, Ep. 223 (5 Aug 2011)
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I could wile away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers,
Consultin’ with the rain;
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’,
If I only had a brain.

E. Y. "Yip" Harburg (1896-1981) American lyricist [Edgar Yipsel Harburg, b. Isidore Hochberg]

“If I Only Had a Brain,” The Wizard of Oz (1939)

It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.

Ben Aaronovitch (b. 1964) British author

Broken Homes (2013)

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer

Time Enough for Love [Lazarus Long] (1973)

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) Lebanese-American poet, writer, painter [Gibran Khalil Gibran]

(Attributed)
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Whenever men cease fighting through necessity, they go to fighting through ambition, which is so powerful in human breasts that, whatever high rank men climb to, never does ambition abandon them.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) Italian politician, philosopher, political scientist

The Discourses on Livy, Book 1, ch. 37 (1517) [tr. Gilbert (1958)]
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Alt. trans.:

• "[Ambition] is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied."
• "For when no longer urged to war on one another by necessity, they are urged by ambition, which has such dominion in their hearts that it never leaves them to whatsoever heights they climb." [tr. Thomson (1883)]
• "Whenever the necessity for fighting is taken away from them, they fight for the same of ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that, no matter the rank to which a man may rise, he never abandons it." [tr. Bondanella (1997)]

Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge — broad, deep knowledge — is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) American author and lecturer

The Story of My Life, pt. 1, ch. 20 (1903)

To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.

Anatole France (1844-1924) French poet, journalist, novelist, Nobel Laureate [pseud. of Jaques-Anatole-François Thibault]

Speech, Académie Française (24 Dec 1896)

If this is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming
Can touch life’s height to a finer fire:
Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming
Were made by the heart’s desire?

Edwin Markham (1852-1940) American poet

“The Crowning Hour” (2), The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913)

Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical statesman, — to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough to get even that.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American diplomat, essayist, poet

“Abraham Lincoln, 1864-1865” (1869)
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Printed in The North American Review, #222 (Jan 1869) under the title "Before and After." Sometimes given as "The idea of a practical statesman is to aim ...."

Make it thy chief Design and thy great Business, not to be Rich and Great: but so to live in this World that thou mayest reasonably believe thou has God for thy Friend.

Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English writer, physician

Introductio ad Prudentiam, # 939 (1731 ed.)
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For I can assure you that we love our country, not for what it was, though it has always been great — not for what it is, though of this we are deeply proud — but for what it someday can, and, through the efforts of us all, someday will be.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) US President (1961-63)

Speech, National Industrial Conference Board (13 Feb 1961)
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‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked.

‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) English writer, fabulist, philologist, academic [John Ronald Reuel Tolkien]

The Lord of the Rings, Vol. 3: The Return of the King, Book 5, ch. 2 “The Passing of the Grey Company” [Aragorn and Eowyn] (1955)
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Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-American physicist

Memoirs of William Miller, quoted in Life (2 May 1955)
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BECKET: Saintliness is also a temptation.

Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) French dramatist

Becket or The Honor of God [Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu], Act 3 (1959)

Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]

Following the Equator, ch. 21, epigraph (1897)

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet

“Elegiac Verse,” In the Harbor (1882)

See Emerson.

You might have been enough the man you are
With striving less to be so.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet

Coriolanus, Act 3, sc. 2, l. 23ff [Volumnia] (c. 1607)
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Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

Don Herold (1889-1966) American humorist, cartoonist, author

(Attributed)
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Quoted in Lawrence Peter, Peter's People (1979) as "Herold's Law."