Attainment Quotes - Page 8

• We cannot forbear suggesting one practical result which it appears to us must be greatly facilitated by the independent manner in which the engine orders and combines its operations: we allude to the attainment of those combinations into which imaginary quantities enter.

  Ada Lovelace

  Independent, Order, Results

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• The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.

  Laura Riding

  Mean, Play, Differences

  "On Ambiguity". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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• The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.

  Josef Pieper

  Joy, Response, Supreme

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• Never leave the site of a goal without first taking some form of positive action towards its attainment. Right now, take a moment to define the first steps you must take to achieve some goal. What can you do today to move forward?

  Tony Robbins

  Moving, Goal, Today

  FaceBook post by Tony Robbins from Sep 21, 2014

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• Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle.

  Michael Chabon

  Fire, Weather, Rust

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• The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within. Therefore it is said: 'In the midst of silence the secret word was spoken to me'.

  Meister Eckhart

  Letting Go, Silence, Secret

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The virtue of a faculty is related to the special function which that faculty performs. Now there are three elements in the soul which control action and the attainment of truth: namely, Sensation, Intellect, and Desire. Of these, Sensation never originates action, as is shown by the fact that animals have sensation but are not capable of action.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Soul, Special

  Aristotle (1996). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.146, Wordsworth Editions

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• The attainment of truth is then the function of both the intellectual parts of the soul. Therefore their respective virtues are those dispositions which will best qualify them to attain truth.

  Aristotle

  Soul, Intellectual, Truth Is

  Aristotle (1934). “The Nicomachean ethics”

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• At the heart of happiness lies peace. It is the last and the highest attainment of the soul.

  Hugh Black

  Peace, Lying, Heart

  Hugh Black (1911). “Happiness”

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• Psychological adulthood is by no means a universal attainment.

  Frances G. Wickes

  Mean, Psychological, Universal

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• The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Levels, Sanity

  "Dianetics 55!". Book by L. Ron Hubbard, 1954.

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• The pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness.

  Herbert Spencer

  Individual Happiness, Limits, Firsts

  Herbert Spencer (2016). “The Data of Ethics: Great Essays”, p.169, VM eBooks

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• The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.

  Lyman Abbott

  Running, Character, Ideals

  Lyman Abbott (1900). “Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott”

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• One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

  James Russell Lowell

  Character, Break Through, Style

  James Russell Lowell (2015). “Abraham Lincoln”, p.22, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The thing about Buddhism is that it stresses attainment of something ineffable, that is where it differs from other religions in that it's more correct. We live in a world with promises of paradise.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Stress, Buddhism

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• The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

  Samuel Beckett

  Reality, Appreciate, Effort

  Samuel Beckett, Georges Duthuit (1965). “Proust”

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• Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public benefit, or evil; and secondly, whether any artificial system of Rules is conducive to the attainment of that skill.

  Richard Whately

  Skills, Two, Evil

  Richard Whately (1872). “Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence and of Persuasion, with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution”, p.29

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• For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.

  Wilfred Thesiger

  Writing, Heart, Sacrifice

  Wilfred Thesiger (2008). “Arabian Sands”, p.236, Penguin

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• To some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it.

  George Henry Lewes

  Men, Popularity, Enjoy

  George Henry Lewes (1846). “The Spanish Drama. Lope de Vega and Calderon”, p.87, London, Knight

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• [M]any females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer residing with males or peddling their asses on the street, thereby having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for somebody else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best - if able to get a "good" job - co-managing the shitpile. What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.

  Valerie Solanas

  Jobs, Sex, Animal

  Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, 1967.

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• Unlimited power may be available when two or more people coordinate their thoughts and actions in a spirit of perfect harmony for the attainment of a definite purpose.

  Napoleon Hill

  Two, People, Perfect

  Napoleon Hill (1997). “Napoleon Hill's Positive Action Plan: 365 Meditations For Making Each Day a Success”, p.85, Penguin

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• So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Life, Tasks, Realizing

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• It is not uncommon for those who at their first entrance into the world were distinguished for attainments or abilities, to disappoint the hopes which they had raised, and to end in neglect and obscurity that life which they began in honour. To the long catalogue of the inconveniences of old age, which moral and satirical writers have so copiously displayed, may be often added the loss of fame.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Loss, Long, Age

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• There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Loneliness, Self, Expression

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.264, e-artnow

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• I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Pain, Believe, Struggle

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