Elusive Goal Quotes

Happiness is a moving target.

The Pursuit of Happiness: It sure seems to like a good chase, doesn't it?

Inspiration is a force not to be wrestled with. You can try, but it will slip under the cracks every time.

I don't think perfection is possible. I think you can attempt to reach perfection, but I don't think it's a possible thing. I think perfection is a moving point, and we spend our artistic lives chasing it.

Trying to be Sherlock Holmes is like trying to catch an arrow in mid-flight.

Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.

Presidency: The greased pig in the game of American politics.

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

I gave up years ago on the concept that you could actually have balance in your life, I think it's a phantom chase.

This will be triumph! This will be happiness! Yea, that very thing, happiness, which I have been pursuing all my life, and have never yet overtaken.

Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

You can never reach the promised land. You can march towards it.

Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.

You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

He ploughs the waves, sows the sand, and hopes to gather the wind in a net, who places his hopes in the heart of a woman.

Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.

I play guitar quite a bit, because I'm always in search of something. I don't play to jam, but because I'm fishing. I'm looking for something, that I hope you can never find. If I do find it, I'm afraid I won't have a need to do this any more.

I think the story of DiMaggio was alluring precisely for its impossibility.

A man's ideal woman is the one he couldn't get.

Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s.