Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.
You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you'll only attain the average and you'll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.
One just soul can attain pardon for a thousand sinners.
Others make a point of trying to attain the precision and poise they see in those who have the ability to choose from a great number of horses those with [. . . ] qualities found in only a very small number of horses. This leads to a circumstance in which these imitators of such studied poise mortify the spirit of a noble horse, and remove from it all of the goodness of temperament Nature has given it.
The best way to create a purposeful life is to allow the soul's decision to precede the body's action. One does not do something in order to be compassionate, one is compassionate and, therefore, does certain things in certain ways. The actions of the body were meant to be reflections of a state of being, not attempts to attain a state of being.
A wise man will always be a Christian, because the perfection of wisdom is to know where lies tranquillity of mind and how to attain it, which Christianity teaches.
The deluding passions are inexhaustible. I vow to extinguish them all. The number of beings is endless. I vow to save them all. The Truth cannot be told. I vow to explain it. The Way which cannot be followed is unattainable. I vow to attain it.
Affliction by that falsehood is the act of dying. To be free from that delusion is to attain Immortality.
I believe we are powerful but we don't use our minds to full capacity. Your mind is powerful enough to help you attain whatever you want.
The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.
Those who succeed have a clear, focused picture of their success. The level of success they attain matches the expansiveness of their dreams
It is much more likely that you will attain liberation if you want liberation for others, than just for yourself.
The air of fashion, which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antigue; the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character.
Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.
If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology
That world beyond is a world of sanctity and radiance; therefore, it is necessary that in this world he should acquire these divine attributes. In that world there is need of spirituality, faith, assurance, the knowledge and love of God. These he must attain in this world so that after his ascension from the earthly to the heavenly Kingdom he shall find all that is needful in that eternal life ready for him.
St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.