Attainments Quotes

“The world has been given a treasure through which its inhabitants can attain greatness if they so desire.”

“The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.”

“We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.”

“To that movement, consecrated by religious principle, sustained by an awful sense of justice, and cheered by the brightest hopes of future good, all our powers, talents, and attainments are devoted.”

“Well, she asked him questions about his age and his attainments. The fact that he was a Catholic gave her pause, but when I explained to her that the present Pope was a well-meaning sort of chap, she said she was prepared to meet him halfway.”

“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.”

“Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original; she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her”

“One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It’s the same thing: a child asks, “What’s going to happen next?” When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it’s not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don’t want to test that simple sense of being human. I don’t want to transform it.”

“We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.”