Attempt Quotes

#1. Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible." -Albert Einstein

Diana Mauer

#2. What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do ... if some novel contagion attempt to infect no longer a small part of the Church alone but the whole Church alike? He shall then see to it that he cleave unto antiquity, which is now utterly incapable of being seduced by any craft or novelty.

Vincent Of Lerins

#3. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past?

Ruskin Bond

#4. A lot of people are afraid to succeed and don't want to fail but if you don't attempt, aren't you already failing in the same spot?

Behdad Sami

#5. Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

Peter C. Brown

#6. Moreover, the subjective interpretation which sees the myth as a transpersonal psychic event is, in view of the myth's origins in the collective unconscious, much fairer than an attempt to interpret it objectively,

Erich Neumann

#7. We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths.

John Green

#8. You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

Robert Cormier

#9. Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

William S. Burroughs

#10. Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

Michio Kaku

#11. When you attempt something new, there's always fear. A couple of helpful slogans to me are "follow the fear" or "fear is a sign of growth."

Gloria Steinem

#12. There are all kinds of people, and in the attempt to build up a solidarity among them, defects of each one affect all the others.

Sri Aurobindo

#13. To Kiss : An attempt to absorb the essence of the other person.

Giacomo Casanova

#14. A lot of things in life seem impossible until it's done. Don't be afraid to attempt the impossible.

Rita Zahara

#15. Racism defends our greed, frees us from self-control and makes others responsible for our failings. It is an attempt to silence the guilt so we can look in the mirror.

Mari Serebrov

#16. You will be judged by what you succeed at gentlemen, not by what you attempt

Clement Attlee

#17. Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.

E. O. Wilson

#18. The first Western attempt to save Africa from itself was in the late 19th century. It was led by Christian missionaries who claimed to be seeking to end poverty, disease and the slave trade.

Andrew Mwenda

#19. It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.

George A Tice

#20. We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.

Pope Francis

#21. The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.

Lesslie Newbigin

#22. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

Henry James

#23. If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief - always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don't actually believe it. You're only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn't.

Steve Pavlina

#24. Handle with care. Probably has Views. Do not attempt to kiss hand.

Terry Pratchett

#25. What I and other commentators do is attempt to move the public opinion. We try to change minds.

Ann Coulter

#26. I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.

Simon McBurney

#27. Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt. Nothing's so hard but search will find it out.

Robert Herrick

#28. He's making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don't know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.

Michael Chabon

#29. The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Colum McCann

#30. Art is an attempt to give substance to existence.

Sondra Horton Fraleigh

#31. The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it

Erich Fromm

#32. Air freshener is man's pitiful attempt to have his food smell as good, after digestion, as they did, before ingestion.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#33. Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.

Peter Singer

#34. Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

F.H. Bradley

#35. In many countries adult pornography legislation is an attempt to legislate something else.

Eric Schmidt

#36. But on this man the look was different. Hungry and possessive, he ate me with his stare, with the blatant desire that he made no attempt to hide.

Alessandra Torre

#37. Too often we attempt to work for God to the limit of our incompetency, rather than to the limit of God's omnipotency.

Hudson Taylor

#38. I knew [Kurt Cobain] and his daughter. And Courtney [Love] came and stayed at my house. R.E.M. worked on two records in Seattle and Peter Buck lived next door to Kurt and Courtney. So we all knew each other. I reached out to him with that project as an attempt to prevent what was going to happen.

Michael Stipe

#39. Expensive clothing is a poor man's attempt to appear prosperous.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#40. I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

Peggy Noonan

#41. One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

Don DeLillo

#42. Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

Vaclav Havel

#43. These systems attempt to box God into a government confined within the perspective of man. Yet when humanity is used as the starting point for interpreting and interacting with God's creation, faulty theology and sociology emerge as mankind attempts to fashion God into the image of man.

Tony Evans

#44. Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.

Henry Spencer

#45. The experience you've had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it.

A.S.A Harrison

#46. Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end ... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.

Victor Papanek

#47. Let's live our lives with great meaning and purpose in the attempt to influence the world to whatever degree our circumstance allows.

Chris Matakas

#48. An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.

Fernando Botero

#49. If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.

Anne Bronte

#50. Accidents and chance are words used by persons who do not think clearly when they attempt to account for certain happenings. Anyone who thinks must be convinced that in a world as orderly as this there is no room for the words accident and chance.

Harold Percival

#51. [Art is] an attempt to escape from life.

H.L. Mencken

#52. Drinking has become one of the most serious social problems. It is basically the result of an attempt to escape from the responsibilities and realities of life.

Billy Graham

#53. All of us, in a sense, struggle continuously all the time, because we never get what we want. The important thing which I've really learned is how do you not give up, because you never succeed in the first attempt.

Mukesh Ambani

#54. To ward off disease or recover health, people as a rule find it easier to depend on healers than to attempt the more difficult task of living wisely.

Rene Dubos

#55. Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

Ron Chernow

#56. Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

Victor J. Stenger

#57. What doesn't kill you, usually succeeds in the second attempt.

Mr. Krabs

#58. What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents ... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.

Zoe Leonard

#59. I lay down on the bed clasping the pictures and buried my face in the pillow in a vain attempt at silencing my sobs. But it was as if all my life's accumulated grief had finally found an outlet and was allowed to take its course. I screamed, I cried, until the grief became bearable. (174)

Linda Olsson

#60. The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.

Roger Scruton

#61. I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer.

Theodore White

#62. The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

Sasa Stanisic

#63. Courage comes through achievement, but also through the attempt.

Chris Guillebeau

#64. When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

Alan W. Watts

#65. But men inspired by prophecy will attempt any foolishness in the knowledge that the fates have ordained their victory.

Bernard Cornwell

#66. I have an almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt to get me out to dinner.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#67. Master your responses to external events
don't attempt to control them.

Caroline Myss

#68. Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.

Albion W. Small

#69. When we attempt to clear up the mess others have made, or when we love the unlovely, we demonstrate the kind of weirdness God likes. We give the lie to the evolutionary survival of the fittest maxim ...

Ann Benton

#70. Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything else on earth.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#71. What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one.

Sigmund Freud

#72. Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

Octavio Paz

#73. I find a lot of things kind of funny and I often say what's on my mind, and then get nine texts from all my friends going, 'What's the matter with you?' But I haven't ever made a big attempt to have any particular image. And I don't really worry about it. If it's funny, I don't care.

Kate Beckinsale

#74. Rather than looking outward in an attempt to predict the outcome, you turn inward to your identity. You base the decision on who you are - or who you want to be.

Adam M. Grant

#75. A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

Eric Hoffer

#76. Those graces which from their presumed facility encourage all to attempt an imitation of them, are usually the most inimitable.

Charles Caleb Colton

#77. Each of us is trapped in a place, a time and a circumstance and our attempt to use our mind to transcend those boundaries are more often than not ineffective.

Daniel M. Gilbert

#78. As soon as the error has been recognized and corrections made, it's equally important that the error be forgotten and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt upon.

Maxwell Maltz

#79. I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called 'civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide,

Kurt Vonnegut

#80. I'm first and foremost a biological explorer. I've looked all over the world for answers. Secondly, I'm an ecological designer, and by that I mean I attempt to work with constellations of nature to create technological forms. So I'm part engineer, part ecologist, part inventor, really.

John Todd

#81. If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.

Milton Friedman

#82. Theology is an attempt to hack god's mind and look at the universe as he does; god's firewalls are so strong no attempt has ever been successful.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#83. No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.

Harry Houdini

#84. you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.

Jeff VanderMeer

#85. These things are not glorified, just recorded. Tattooed on the heart; burned into the family's history. This piecing together of the life of your child; this homage, this attempt to put it all in order; and even though you will one day wish for the heartbreak to leave you, it never will.

Whitney Otto

#86. When I moved to Los Angeles, I figured I'm really going to make an attempt to become a real actor. And when I did that, I thought it was time for me to face my parents and tell them what I did.

Kenneth Choi

#87. It turns out that we're not the only ones who go out on a scientific limb as we discuss or attempt to discuss cars, car repairs and scientific education in America today.

Tom Magliozzi

#88. If you must, go and frolic with a herdsman under a starry, sky, but do not attempt to share his daylight. For the sun works on men as an elixir- it blears their eyes to the worth of women and makes them dare to think they should rule over us.

Anne Fortier

#89. The challenges that attempt to break us are, in the end, what actually make us.

Michelle Beber

#90. If you want something badly enough, make an attempt. If you want to paint, get a brush and do it. If you want to sing, sing. A lot of people get scared. They're afraid to fail. Take that word out of your vocabulary. You don't "fail." You've "tried your best."

Jane Seymour

#91. That's what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.

George Saunders

#92. A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong

Francis Crick

#93. Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.

Steven Erikson

#94. The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling.

James Purdy

#95. One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

Frederick Buechner

#96. He ... was attached by ties stronger than reason could break
chains, forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen.

Emily Bronte

#97. There is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out.

Michael Singer

#98. No man or woman is uniformly successful ... we must all expect a rather high percentage of failure in the things we attempt.

Barnaby Keeney

#99. Responding to a suicide attempt by insisting that it must stop, and devoting the full resources of therapy to preventing it, is a communication with compassion and care at its very core.

Marsha M. Linehan

#100. I borrowed my friend's car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true, in the first day of borrowing the car, I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.

Emily Mortimer