Aspiration

See also: Hope and Wishes

An aspiration is a desire to achieve something.

Quotes

• I could hear the mild voice of my Companion pointing the moral of my vision, and stimulating me to aspire, and to teach others to aspire.
  • Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland (1884), Section 20. "How the Sphere encouraged me in a Vision".
• Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.
  • Anderson, Gillian (19 June 2011). Joseph Galliano. ed. Dear Me: More Letters to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self. 
• Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration.
  • Bahá'u'lláh, Proclamation of Bahá'u'lláh.
• There is not a heart but has its moments of longing,— yearning for something better, nobler, holier than it knows now.
  • Henry Ward Beecher, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 15.
• His early dreams of good outstripp'd the truth,
  And troubled manhood follow'd baffled youth.
  • Lord Byron, Lara, Canto 18.
• Trapped dreams must die.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Certain Hour (1916), "To Robert Gamble Cabell II: In Dedication of The Certain Hour'".
• To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.
  • Khalil Gibran, reported in Become a Conscious Creator: A Return to Self-Empowerment (2007) by Lisa Ford, p. 44.
• The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
  • Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931).
• Aspiration, worthy ambition, desires for higher good for good ends — all these indicate a soul that recognizes the beckoning hand of the good Father who would call us homeward towards Himself — all these are the ground and justification for a Christian discontent; but a murmuring, questioning, fault-finding spirit has direct and sympathetic alliance with nothing but the infernal.
  • Josiah Gilbert Holland, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 15.
• In truth, there is no religion, no worship in our prosperity and ease. So far as we are happy, we are in a state of satisfied desire; so far as we are religious, we are in a state of aspiration and unsatisfied desire.
  • James Martineau, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 15.
• Father! forgive the heart that clings
  Thus trembling to the things of time,
  And bid my soul, on angel's wings
  Ascend into a purer clime.
  • Jane Roscoe, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 15.
• On what wings dare he aspire?
  • William Blake, The Tyger.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Aspiration on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of aspiration on Wiktionary