In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
Miguel de Cervantes

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Henry Miller

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?
Humphry Davy

In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
Gregory Bateson

In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it's a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside.
Tadao Ando

In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash.
Maggie Gallagher

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.
David Bohm

It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.
George Borrow

It is madness to attempt to hold. In the first place the troops cannot do it and in the second place if they do not retreat they will be destroyed. I repeat that this order be rescinded or that you find someone else.
Gerd von Rundstedt

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.
Christopher Lasch

It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
Quintilian

It is to be deeply regretted that the clergymen would oppose an effort to teach the people the Bible truths; nevertheless, we find much opposition everywhere, and many clergymen will attempt to prevent the people from reading what is here written.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.
Harry Oppenheimer

It was an attempt to stick the Congress's finger in King Hussein's eye.
George P. Shultz

It will never do to plead sin as an excuse for sin, or to attempt to justify sinful acts by pleading that we have an evil heart. This instead of being a valid apology, is the very ground of our condemnation.
Archibald Alexander

It will undoubtedly happen, that the enemy will make the attempt, today, tomorrow or the next day, at some time, to break into this fortress of Europe at one point or another. That will undoubtedly be the case.
Heinrich Himmler

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.
Arianna Huffington

It would be useless for any player to attempt to explain successful batting.
Tris Speaker

It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.
Edward Sapir

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
E. O. Wilson