Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.
Winston Graham

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Zhuangzi

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
George Washington Carver

I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued.
Carolyn Wells

I do write about people who are complex and are striving with something and can't quite get past their own stuff, which would be a proxy for myself because that's what the deal is with me.
Eric Bogosian

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.
Fred Frith

I have that thing in my stomach where I just need to keep striving for things. In my mind, I want the fairy tale.
January Jones

I have tried to keep on with my striving because this is the only hope I have of ever achieving anything worthwhile and lasting.
Arthur Ashe

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.
Cicely Tyson

I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.
Charlie Haden

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
Tim Cahill

I worked hard and made my own way, just as my father had. And just, I'm sure, as he hoped I would. I learned, from observing him, the satisfaction that comes from striving and seeing a dream fulfilled.
Sigourney Weaver

I'm striving toward this acting thing. I'm definitely gonna work hard on that, whatever comes my way, I'm gonna work hard on it.
Mary J. Blige

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.
John Le Carre

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
Buddha

In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.
Edward de Bono

Infinite striving to be the best is man's duty; it is its own reward. Everything else is in God's hands.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is not to be disguised, that a war has broken out between the North and the South. - Political and commercial men are industriously striving to restore peace: but the peace, which they would effect, is superficial, false, and temporary.
Gerrit Smith

It is only through raising expectations and striving for excellence that our children can reach their full potential.
Brad Henry

Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
Rudolf Arnheim