Unrealized Aspirations Quotes

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

I'm not usually comfortable to talk about things I haven't done yet.

We don't want to keep talking about 'potential.' That word is the most dangerous word in professional sports.

The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.

Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.

For a lot of different reasons I didn't fulfil my potential.

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion.

When I was younger I used to want to own a sweet shop so I could eat sweets all day, but that dream died a long time ago.

Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.

I think I laid it all out there for 19 years, and you don't always achieve all the goals that you shoot for.

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

You never forget the feeling of not getting to the World Series. Yes, it sticks with you.

Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.

If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

We often experience more regret over the part we have left, than pleasure over the part we have preferred.

...and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.

I wanted my own rock band and stuff like that, but things didn't work out. I didn't have the patience to write my own songs and learn it and everything.

A desire that has never been fulfilled is considerably less acute than one that has been fulfilled and then checked at the source.

Do you want to know what I most regret about my youth? That I didn't dream more boldly and demand of myself more impossible things; for all one does in maturity is to carve in granite or porphyry the soap bubble one blew in youth! Oh to have dreamed harder!