endeavour quotes

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

- Matthew Arnold
  Essays in Criticism First Series,'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'.

Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.

-Thomas Carlyle
  Signs of the Times.

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, Content to dwell in decencies for ever.

- Alexander Pope
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To a Lady', l.163^4.

Nihil nos conari, velle, appetere, neque cupere, quia id bonum esse judicamus; sed contra, nos propterea aliquid bonum esse judicare, quia id conamur, volumus, appetimus, atque cupimus. We endeavour, wish, desire, or long for nothing because we deem it good; but on the other hand, we deem a thing good because we endeavour, wish for, desire, or long for it.

- Baruch also known as Benedict de Spinoza Spinoza
  Ethics, bk.3, prop.9, note.

Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape.

- Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
  Vile Bodies, ch.1.

All thebusiness of war, and indeedall thebusiness of life, isto endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I call 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill'.

- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Quoted inJohnWilson Croker The Croker Papers (edited by Bernard Pool,1885), vol.3, ch.28.

Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, To perish never: Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor man nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterlyabolish or destroy! Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

-William Wordsworth
c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 9 (published1807).