#attain

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. ↗

— Baruch Spinoza

#attain #because #being #free #highest

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#blessings #contentment #happiness #pray #soul

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it. ↗

— Christopher Alexander

#alive #attained #brings #building #cannot

Young children were sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to attain good learning. ↗

— Roger Ascham

#attain #beating #children #driven #good

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. ↗

— Saint Augustine

#bathed #contradictory #experience #extracting #find

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence. ↗

— Abigail Adams

#ardor #attained #chance #diligence #learning

No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction. ↗

— Charles Kendall Adams

#amount #attains #determines #distinction #doing

The attainment of the present status of Thailand has to depend on the ability or the actions of all the inhabitants of the country. ↗

— Bhumibol Adulyadej

#actions #attainment #country #depend #inhabitants

Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, 'You're not a father.' I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable. ↗

— Drew Barrymore

#attainable #birthdays #cannot #dad #emotionally

I had now arrived at my seventeenth year, and had attained my full height, a fraction over six feet. I was well endowed with youthful energy, and was of an extremely sanguine temperament. ↗

— Henry Bessemer

#attained #endowed #energy #extremely #feet