Quotes on Trying

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

Have you found someone to share your heart with? Are you giving to your community? Are you at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.

It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.

The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.

If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

I've reached a point in life where it's no longer necessary to try to impress. If they like me the way I am, that's good. If they don't, that's too bad.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

You'd be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.