Soft addictions are an alluring, seductive aspect of our culture - they are easy to attain and socially acceptable, they are even encouraged in many cases. Yet they are lethal to the spirit.
Judith Wright

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.
Hans Urs von Balthasar

Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.
Guglielmo Marconi

The advocates of abortion on demand falsely assume two things: that women must suffer if the lives of unborn children are legally protected; and that women can only attain equality by having the legal option of destroying their innocent offspring in the womb.
Robert Casey

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.
Herbert Simon

The gift of broadcasting is, without question, the lowest human capacity to which any man could attain.
Harold Nicolson

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
Miguel de Unamuno

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others.
Ulrich Beck

The object of man's worship, whatever it be, will naturally be his standard of perfection. He clothes it with every attribute, belonging, in his view, to a perfect character; and this character he himself endeavors to attain.
Simon Greenleaf

The only people who attain power are those who crave it.
Erich Kastner

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.
Thabo Mbeki

The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador attain liberty, and inspired our forefathers to shed their blood for the United States' independence, cannot die. Today, this spirit of solidarity must and will empower all of us to rebuild Haiti.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide

The sum of the whole is plainly this: The nature of man considered in his single capacity, and with respect only to the present world, is adapted and leads him to attain the greatest happiness he can for himself in the present world.
Joseph Butler

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.
Russell Lynes

There is also a perfection of degrees, by which a person performs all the commands of God, with the full exertion of all his powers, without the least defect. This is what the law of God requires, but what the saints cannot attain to in this life.
Charles Buck

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
Samuel Johnson

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.
Josiah Royce

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
Samuel Johnson