Nate Schoonmaker > Nate's Quotes

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Aim higher in case you fall short.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.”
― Coco Chanel

“Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
― Albert Einstein

“Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
― Bruce Lee

“Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.”
― E. Joseph Cossman

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”
― Karen Lamb

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“If you don't know where you are going,
you'll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“Sometimes that mountain you've been climbing is just a grain of sand, and what you've been up there searching for forever, is in your hands. When you figure out love is all that matters after all it sure makes everything else seem so small.”
― Carrie Underwood

“If you're trying to be miserable, it's important you don't have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don't read anything informative, don't listen to anything useful, don't do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind.”
― John Bytheway, How to Be Totally Miserable: A Self-Hinder Book

“As long as I am breathing, in my eyes, I am just beginning.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If you're bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, you don't have enough goals.”
― Lou Holtz

“know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it.”
― Nora Roberts, Morrigan's Cross

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”
― Robert Schuller

“People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'"

[What It Is (2009)]”
― Dylan Moran

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
― Seneca the Younger

“Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“Not all dreamers are winners, but all winners are dreamers. Your dream is the key to your future. The Bible says that, "without a vision (dream), a people perish." You need a dream, if you're going to succeed in anything you do.”
― Mark Gorman