Quotes About Trying

People ask me all the time, "What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?" It's like, "No, I'm trying to do me." Whatever that is. I don't know what that is, but that's the basis. I'm trying to be true and I'm trying to be honest.

The stress that we [with Abilities] always feel is trying to continue advancing with our music. That's our plight, it's ingrained in our personalities. We feel like we're trying to race the world of music itself - just trying to create the best music, and as soon as we get done with one piece we're trying to figure out how to top it.

I'm trying to do something real different; I'm trying to bring the street to real pop. I'm trying to bring the street to pop. Not watering it down, no nothing.

Tell me what's wrong with this idea: If you're selling to somebody, find someone like that person to sell to them. If you're trying to reach swing voters, if you're trying to reach people on the fence, if you're trying to reach Republicans who are unsure about this candidate... get people who switched! Get people who are registered Republicans. Get people who were George Bush voters who can't bring themselves to do it again. Talk to them, get them to explain what their reasons are, and show them to people. What's wrong with this idea?!

I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.

In theater and dance, I was trying to win someone's approval, trying to get in, trying to be good. It felt out of my control, whereas music suddenly felt like this free expression. It was fun.

They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly. No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked. They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone." And what difference does that make?

I don't get the impression that most sources of media - like television and movies - are trying to get out a positive message, necessarily. My impression is they're trying to get a message out that promotes their personal opinion, position or belief and they're trying to do something that makes money. They want to turn a buck.

One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone. And for this simple moment, how much fuss we make! How much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred, just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room on a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate - all that politics. And then the train comes and you are gone forever.

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

The people at the NSA aren't trying to ruin your life. They're not trying to put you in authoritarian dystopia. These are normal people trying to do good work in hard circumstances.

I wasn't trying to be rich or famous; I was trying to figure out what is this thing in me that won't let me sleep that makes me restless and makes me keep pushing. I was trying to discover who I was.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

I am trying to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air - trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.

Trying to keep a society together, trying to keep the older and the younger people together, trying to keep those who live in rural areas together with those who live in cities is one of the most important and most noble tasks of politicians these days.

Learning a [skateboard] trick is kind of like a puzzle; you have to keep trying, and trying, and trying, and adapting and changing, and adapting and changing, and finally it works.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

If I had been trying to take the job away from him in a sneaky, underhand manner, then I deserved all I got. But it was the other way around. I was trying to get him the job.

I'm not trying to minimize things; I'm trying to bring them back to reality.

I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.

I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.

I'm not trying to prove anybody wrong, I'm just trying to prove something to myself.

I am a director and I think actually they're not that different - dramas and docs aren't that different. When I'm doing a drama I'm trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The hair, the make-up, the costume, the design, you're trying to make it authentic. And when you've got a documentary it's all authentic, so what story are you going to tell and how do you make it dramatic and exciting? It's the same thing.

I'm still trying to learn how to do it, I'm still trying to figure out how to make films, but, yeah, it started then [in 1979].

You can say we're trying too hard or that we didn't try hard enough, but we're not trying at all; we're just doing what we do.

... our purpose in founding our state was not to promote the happiness of a single class, but, so far as possible, of the whole community. Our idea was that we were most likely to justice in such a community, and so be able to decide the question we are trying to answer. We are therefore at the moment trying to construct what we think is a happy community by securing the happiness not of a select minority, but of a whole.

I was trying to fit in for so long, until about Junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

Trying to get today's Republicans to accept basic facts is like trying to get your dog to take a pill. You have to feed them the truth wrapped in a piece of baloney, hold their snouts shut and stroke their throats. and even then, just when you think they've swallowed it, they spit it out on the linoleum.

Trying to coach kindergarteners in soccer is like trying to herd cats.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

When you're a music director, you have people constantly sending you music and trying to get - I mean, I'm sure you have the exact same thing when you do a magazine - that you have people constantly wanting to get your attention. And I think I learnt a lot from being on that end of things, when I was trying to book the tour, the first tour we did.

Right now, women's worth is being quantified by how they look and their Instagrams and likes. That's all so self-created, so why are we trying to add to that? It's hard enough to be a young woman, or man, growing up and trying to find your identity, rather than having a whole Internet of people weighing in on it. It makes me sad for those kids.

Music is supposed to be entertaining and if it touches you emotionally, so much the better. Sometimes you do it to save your own life, not anybody else's. That's why I write. I'm not trying to change anybody else's life or the world, I'm trying to keep from blowing my own brains out. That's the real point.

I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.

the other guineahen died of a broken heart and we came to New York. I used to sit at a table,drawing wings with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept remembering how your mind looked when it slept for several years,to wake up asking why. So then you turned into a photograph of somebody who’s trying not to laugh at somebody who’s trying not to cry

Superman, when he's fighting you, isn't like Batman. He also isn't like Spider-man, who will bully you and make fun of his villains. Why do you think Spider-man's villains all hate him so much? Maybe because as he breaks their bones he's mocking them! Batman's villains are all insane! Superman, when he goes after someone, is essentially not trying to beat them. He's trying to save them from themselves.

I don't copy recipes without trying them out. I don't reprint without trying them again.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

I think I'm well on the way of overcoming a very big hurdle that's been in my way for several years. Which is trying to find a way to not let the insecurity of my profession get the better of me and make me crazy. I'm trying to find a way to maintain my own personal balance in the midst of everything.

I'm not trying to get five medals. I'm not trying to be Michael Phelps.

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

The good thing about life is that you can research anywhere you are. I'm just constantly gathering little bits of information all the time. I'm always grabbing something out of the headlines, out of the news or reading a book about astronomy and just trying to figure out how to get my head around the facts but the bigger stress is trying to connect those facts to normal life situations and our relationship with God.

Just because you're starting from something which you know - a theory which you know is right and trying to further develop your understand of that theory is maybe a more fruitful thing to do than trying to just throw all that out and start afresh with something more speculative.

I'm just a normal mother with the same struggles as any other mother who's trying to do everything at once and trying to be a wife and maintain a relationship. There's absolutely nothing perfect about my life, but I just try hard.

When the government is trying to penny-pinch and, at the same time, trying to keep a defense expenditure and so forth, which are regarded as quote unquote essential, the education is regarded inessential.

We tried so hard. We were always trying to help each other. But not because we were helpless. He needed to get things for me, just as I needed to get things for him. It gave us purpose. Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other. I would get his slippers. He would make my tea. I would turn up the heat so he could turn up the air conditioner so I could turn up the heat.

I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.