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.

I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

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?!

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?

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.

I'm a Catholic, and I have always been fascinated by not just my religion, but religion in general, in the sense that it is the ultimate brand that they're trying to sell. Whereas Ford is trying to sell cars, the Vatican is trying to sell salvation, which is a much better product to be peddling.

Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic.

Of course there's a backlash. Of course. Look, half the country voted for Donald Trump. But I think one of the things that we try to do on Update is we try to hit him on the facts. If Hillary Clinton was President we would be making fun of her just as much. We're not trying to be right, we're not trying to be wrong, we're trying to be funny.

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.

Trying to hit Phil Niekro is like trying to eat jello with chopsticks. Sometimes you get a piece but most of the time you get hungry.

I don't like movies that are trying to preach and trying to tell you how to feel.

I don't like being under someone elses thumb. I'm very supportive of other female artists, especially those trying to make their own statement... trying to do what they want instead of being someone else's Barbie doll.

Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age.

[W]e must stop trying to protect our planet from every imaginable, exaggerated or imaginary risk. And we must stop trying to protect it on the backs, and the graves, of he nation's and world's most powerless and impoverished people.

Trying to observe the slow shift from self-centeredness to empathy is like trying to watch grass grow.

I didn't understand at the time why Vince was so interested in teaching me life lessons when all I was trying to do was get my video played. But now I think it's because he saw a little bit of himself in me. Just like me, he was a rebel who listened to no one and did whatever it took to get the job done, pissing people off with his stubbornness and drive in the process. Therefore, he was trying to teach me how to better myself instead of repeatedly getting into trouble by rubbing people the wrong way.

I'm working on new techniques. I'm trying to find a way to make fresco that can be detached from a wall, and I'm trying to find new people who can help me work on a very large scale in bronze.

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.

I think the cloud of suspicion has been hanging over baseball for a while. I think there has been some positive things that have come out of that. There has been a drug test policy that was been implemented that got the blessings of both the Players Association and MLB. They are trying to maintain the integrity of this sport and trying to get it back, but that cloud I think will hang over a little longer.

Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

The essence of loving living as a follower of Jesus isn't in trying harder but in enjoying more. I'm not saying you can change without trying. I'm saying that enjoyment empowers effort. Pleasure in God is the power for purity.

Money is a tool – it’s the means, not the end. Inspiration is the metric that dictates whether or not a project is a success. It’s more realistic than trying to aim for radio play, or trying to satisfy an AR, or the other gatekeepers on these platforms. I don’t even know how to create with those things in mind. But if you tell me the goal is to inspire? That makes my job a lot easier.

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

We are simply committing ourselves to paying attention to our life. We use meditation to help us in that attention process. We are not trying to become good meditators. We are trying to wake up.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

I'm not trying to find answers anymore. I'm trying to live what I know.

We are honest about our methods and our mistakes. We are not perfect - it isn't possible to be perfect - but we are trying to go in the right direction and in those circumstances, it's best not to mystify what we are trying to do.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

There is something else that is trying to come through - that lure of becoming - and it does come from the realm of spirit, it does come from the quantum universe, it does come from the great spark that is the threshold of time and history trying to emerge and electrify us.

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.

Falling in love with somebody is like a rush of heroin, and trying to break up with somebodyis like trying to kick heroin.

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.

Trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with things other than God is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual.

I think that it's important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will. And that's the kind of judge that I want.

I wasn't trying to do a play or do what Kevin Spacey did. I was trying to do my own thing with it.

People were having sex before I was born. My parents had sex before I was born, nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to stop sex. I'm trying to stop people from dying from sex.

I cannot save the world, that's not what I'm trying to do. I guess I'm just trying to walk the walk and be an example to those that want it. Not everybody does, but if Mary J Blige can come out of that same hole you were in, then you can do it too - that's my goal: to do that without saying it, but actually live it.

I feel that people are basically trying to do their best in the world. Even when you see people making mistakes, you understand why theyre making a mistake. Everybody has flaws, everybody has demons, everybody has ghosts, but I think you watch people and you see everybody trying to do their best.

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 believe that what I've worked for - women and children, civil rights against poverty, trying to level the playing field for people to have a better chance - is what I still believe is important and what I'm trying to do today.

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.

Trying to compromise EXCELLENCE, is like trying to let a little bit of air out of a balloon with a hat pin.

As I was growing up, people were always trying to talk about their sexual conquests, trying to make themselves appear like a cassanova. I'm surprised you haven't heard that, I really am.

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.

I am trying to make my accent so it won't bother anyone, but I am not going to drive myself crazy trying to pretend I am an American girl when I am from Colombia.

It is the Muslim community that has the best chance of stopping and checking and pushing back on people who are trying to politicize their own faith. So this attack on Islam is an attack on a great faith. It undermines the people who are trying to rescue this faith from these horrible people. It endangers every human being on earth because it accelerates the radicalization of some and emboldens the worst elements of that faith. So this fight is a fight I think that we have to take on.