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21 " It is 10 PM now, and Godzilla has been sitting at his desk in front of his laptop for six to seven hours. He has accomplished hardly anything today. Godzilla is drinking a lot of beer. He can not stop smoking cigarettes. His room is blue with cigarette smoke, and Godzilla sits on a chair in there, minimizing and maximizing Mozilla Firefox repeatedly. He is not over his girlfriend's house because she said on the cell phone that she needed time, alone, to think about their relationship. Godzilla worries that he will not be able to take care of himself if they break up. "
― Brandon Scott Gorrell
22 " A fulfilling long-term relationship is not accomplished by just finding the one. It is rather a co-operation between two passionate and highly motivated partners working together, figuring out every single situation holding hands. If there is trust at the root of the relationship, if the partners make an effort to keep it interesting, if difficulties are handled tactfully and if you can appreciate every single deed of your partner no matter how insignificant it is, the flames of love would never burn out and your love can truly live happily ever after. "
― Abhijit Naskar , The Art of Neuroscience in Everything
23 " If you were to wake up tomorrow to a life where all your goals had been accomplished but had no memory of the work you put into succeeding, would you feel the happiness that you would have if you had completed your goals yourself? Probably not. Sure, perhaps you would live happily for a while given that you are suddenly living a dream life but in the long run something would be wrong. You wouldn’t have learned the lessons you needed to maintain this new lifestyle. You see, the success is found in the journey, not the finish line. You need to learn the lessons that come with working hard, failing, trying again, and, eventually, succeeding at living the life you have always wanted. "
24 " Nothing great is ever accomplished by following standards. "
25 " Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats’s famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. "
26 " Your spiritual path is decided by your vision and accomplished by your consistency. "
― Samuel T. Padmore , Invading the Kingdom of Darkness: Rescuing Families and Nations
27 " I fear living a life where I could have accomplished something and didn't. That's what I fear. I don't fear death. "
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
28 " An old Russian proverb . . . " Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear." The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful. There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. "
29 " True Forgiveness has been accomplished when you find yourself Thankful for the experience. "
30 " You can only be fulfilled and accomplished in life when you effectively maximize yourself "
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31 " The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough. "
― Robert D. Kaplan
32 " History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit. "
― Thomas B. Costain
33 " I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier. I thought a lot and developed the faraway look of a dreamer, for it was always the distant heights that fascinated me and drew me to them in spirit. I was not sure what could be accomplished with tenacity and little else, but the target was set high and each rebuff only saw me more determined to see at least one major dream to its fulfillment. "
34 " Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched. When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity. "
― Frédéric Gros , A Philosophy of Walking
35 " You speak as though they cannot be trusted with freedom to build a future for themselves, given the opportunity. Certainly humanity as a whole shares a collective guilt for incompetency in crafting a decent future for ourselves – more often than not, we seem eager to destroy others for our own selfish gain. If you truly care for their prospects once freed, then raise a voice and a hand towards that cause! But do not condemn those who work towards the step that must be accomplished first. Liberty first must be achieved, before anything else can have any meaning. - Jo March to Kate Vaughn, on the abolition of slavery "
36 " What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin. "
― David Harvey , Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
37 " Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory could be found a parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the 1970s – Pinochet is the exemplary case – would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tamper with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world. "
― Perry Anderson
38 " He may be incensed, said Dizzy. I've never doubted the old parson's faith, but it has no place in politics. Good God, just imagine if each man allowed himself to be swayed by moral compunctions; we'd never get a damned thing accomplished in Parliament. "
― Carol K. Carr , India Black (Madam of Espionage, #1)
39 " Paul's greatest contribution to the progressive cause wasn't what he accomplished in the senate, although he accomplished a lot. It's the way he inspired others to take action, and taught them to be effective, and gave them the confidence to stand up and shout about what they believed it. "
― Al Franken , Al Franken, Giant of the Senate
40 " In California, after weeks of meeting transported Americans from practically every state in the Union, I announced to Kareem that I liked these strange loud people, the Americans. When he asked me why, I had difficulty in voicing what I felt in my heart. I finally said: 'I believe this marvellous mixture of cultures has brought civilization closer to reality than in any other culture in history.' I was certain Kareem did not understand what I meant and I tried to explain. 'So few countries manage complete freedom for all their citizens without chaos; this has been accomplished in this huge land. It appears impossible for large numbers of people to stay on a course of freedom for all when so many options are available. Just imagine what would happen in the Arab world; a country the size of America would have a war a minute, with each man certain he had the only correct answer for the good of all! In our lands, men look no farther than their own noses for a solution. Here, it is different.'Kareem looked at me in amazement. Not used to a woman interested in the greater scheme of things, he questioned me into the night to learn my thoughts on various matters. It was obvious that my husband was not accustomed to a woman with opinions of her own. He seemed in utter shock that I thought of political issues and the state of the world. Finally, he kissed me on the neck and said that I would continue my education once we returned to Riyadh. Irritated at his tone of permission, I told him I was not aware that my education was up for discussion. "
― Jean Sasson , Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia