Attempts

Famous quotes containing the word attempts:

    Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?... A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)