Unattainable Quotes - Page 5

• but then you realize that this ‘whole package’ everyone’s looking for is unattainable. No one can be everything you want them to be.

  Susane Colasanti

  Want, Realizing, Packages

  Susane Colasanti (2009). “Waiting For You”, p.200, Penguin

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• One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

  Franz Kafka

  Hate, Moving, Men

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• ...and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.

  Janette Rallison

  Dream, Broken, Happened

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• You can't measure dreams when you're a dreamer, because most often the caliber is unattainable.

  Adamo Macri

  Dream, Dreamer, Caliber

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• If you do not hope, you will not win that which is not hoped for, since it is unattainable and inaccessible.

  Heraclitus

  Hope, Winning, Inaccessible

  Heraclitus of Ephesus (2017). “Heraclitus on the two antithetical forces in life: Interdependent and mutually convertible aspects of One Cause”, p.6, Philaletheians UK

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• The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Adventure, Safety, Spirit

  1925 Science and the Modern World.

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• Don't shoot for something unattainable - completely outside of your nature or opportunity.

  Michael Johnson

  Inspirational, Motivational, Opportunity

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• I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Art, Feelings, Musician

  "Music, Influence, and 'Deeply Unnecessary' Art". Interview with Ben Arthur, logger.believermag.com. March 17, 2015.

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• Spirituality is best manifested on the ground, not in the air. Rapturous day-dreams, flights of heavenly fancy, longings to see the Invisible, are less expensive and less expressive than the plain doing of duty. To have bread excite thankfulness and a drink of water send the heart to God is better than sighs for the unattainable. To plow a straight furrow on Monday or dust a room well on Tuesday or kiss a bumped forehead on Wednesday is worth more than the most ecstatic thrill under Sunday eloquence. Spirituality is seeing God in common things, and showing God in common tasks.

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock

  Dream, Monday, Heart

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1901). “Thoughts for Every-day Living from the Spoken and Written Words of Maltbie Davenport Babcock”

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• Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

  William Peter Blatty

  Men, Perfect, Joy

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• We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God's holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God's power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Unique, Men, Thinking

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.114, Fig

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• Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

  Michael Shermer

  Machines, Human Nature, Immortality

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• Truth may be unattainable, but honesty is not.

  Stephen Watson

  Life, Honesty, May

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• Stieglitz conceived, though he never carried out, a series of photographs of the heads of stallions and mares, of bulls and cows, in the act of mating, hoping to catch in the brute an essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable photograph of a passionate human mating.

  Lewis Mumford

  Quality, Essentials, Passionate

  Lewis Mumford, Robert Wojtowicz (2008). “Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s”, p.58, Univ of California Press

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• We are full of dreams [...] We long for the unattainable. We believe in the nonsense of fables. There is no pure love; there is lust and there is need.

  David Gemmell

  Dream, Believe, Long

  "Quest for Lost Heroes". Book by David Gemmell, Ch. 12, 1990.

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• The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, Lying, Hero

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.304, University of Chicago Press

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• If you want to know what true art is: Go outside on a clear night, wait until it gets very, very dark, then look up! You will see no rules of composition, no evidence of superior technique. Yet, you will be staring into the very face of pure, unadulterated beauty and wonder. That is the unattainable Ideal for which I must constantly strive.

  Derek R. Audette

  Art, Dark, Night

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• For reason's measurements, which attain unto temporal things, do not attain unto things that are free from time-just as hearing does not attain unto whatever is not-audible, even though these things exist and are unattainable by hearing.

  Nicholas of Cusa

  Doe, Hearing, Measurement

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• Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

  Ted Koppel

  Objectivity, Perspective, Political

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• Wile E. Coyote is a coyote with nothing but good intentions. But Road Runner comes along and is unattainable, he wants it and can't get it, and thus he becomes a villain that is impossible to be around. Bill O'Reilly is a villain that is so in love with himself and the sound of his voice that he's literally become the personification of evil.

  Shawn Hatosy

  Voice, Evil, Sound

  Source: collider.com

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• Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

  Albert Einstein

  Art, Men, Mind

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.168, Open Road Media

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• Omnicompetence,' the ability to obtain whatever one wants or needs, is an unattainable but continuously approachable ideal for all mankind - past, present, and future.

  Russell L. Ackoff

  Past, Needs, Want

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• Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Love, Wall, Holiday

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1852). “The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray”, p.125

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• Dynamic ecstasy is absolute romanticism , absolute heroism . And here I return to my point. From my point of view, after the catastrophe which we feel and think is universal, a catastrophe resulting from an excess of useless dynamism of useless progress, of useless realism, of useless technology, after this an unattainable democracy is to be reached through the conception and realization of a new romanticism.

  Juan Ramon Jimenez

  Technology, Thinking, Views

  "Heroic Reason" by Juan Ramon Jimenez (p. 231), 1957.

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• Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveller in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Peace, Stars, Eye

  Aung San Suu Kyi's Nobel Lecture in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. June 16, 2012.

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