Quotes About Goals

Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.

— Jean Toomer

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

— Dag Hammarskjold

Hitch your wagon to a star.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

— Don Marquis

We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular, The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries.  This is the general rule.  The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

— Samuel Butler

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get them, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.

— Leo Burnett

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

— James Russell Lowell

Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.

— George A. Moore

The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal.  The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.

— Benjamin E. Mays

You don’t understand!  I could’ve been a contender.  I could’ve had class and been somebody.  Real class.  Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am.

— Terry in On the Waterfront, screenplay by Budd Schulberg