Pushing Ourselves Quotes

Sooner or later we stop running, stop climbing, stop reaching for the sky. We stop pushing ourselves toward unattainable goals because common sense tells us that the only logical thing to do is push ourselves toward the attainable ones. If running through the world like kids on the playground is a kind of dream, then at a certain point we just stop dreaming. ~ Sam A. Patel

It's so easy to fall into a comfortable groove in life where you do the things that you like, and because of that, often times, we don't grow or change because we're not pushing ourselves. ~ Flea

HAPPINESS: "Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming...Flourishing is rooted in action..."happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence"...a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence...Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in...Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn't enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish...Resilience is a virtue required for flourishing, bur being resilient will not guarantee that we will flourish. Unfairness, injustice, and bad fortune will snuff our promising lives. Unasked-for pain will still come our way...We can build resilience and shape the world we live in. We can't rebuild the world...three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and happiness of excellence...people who are flourishing usually have all three kinds of happiness in their lives...Aristotle understood: pushing ourselves to grow, to get better, to dive deeper is at the heart of happiness...This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing mastery...It is about the exercise of powers. The most common mistake people make ~ Eric Greitens

The road to success is filled with women pushing their husbands along. ~ Thomas Dewar

Pushing ourselves to do too much despite the pain will not result in gain but may cause additional injury. However, sometimes we do need to push ourselves to get up and move around to avoid becoming stiff and actually increasing our pain. ~ Karen Lee Richards

Make the subtle shift from pushing ourselves to be the best in the world, to allowing ourselves to be the best for the world. ~ Dewitt Jones

Our lives should have depth, which means pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones and not taking the easy way out all the time. ~ Marie Tillman

Never be the best in the room.

The champions in life--in every field of endeavor--feel the constant challenge to take the content up a notch. Champions know that if we are not stretching and pushing ourselves to our ultimate capacity and potential as human beings, someone else, somewhere else, is. ~ Derek Hough

With each one, I love working on the story and the characters. The stunts, each time, we keep pushing ourselves harder and harder. And they are stunts, so there's always a danger in doing them, but fortunately, I have not had a problem. I have not missed a day of work, ever, in my career. I'm always there early. And I train very hard, and we prepare very carefully for each one. ~ Tom Cruise

Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities. ~ Josh Waitzkin

I am a positive person. I never think of the glass as half empty. I just keep pushing forward. ~ Rosie Perez

The darkness gets bigger; it's pushing at the edges of my skull, clouding my vision. I grab Evie by the hand and start to drag her inside. She protests vociferously. ~ Paula Hawkins

I really will never understand pushing back on comedians who are like, "I'm like a politician campaigning and shaking hands with these people. They're going to be okay." ~ Jen Kirkman

You're just pushing your food around, aren't you? You've barely taken two bites. I thought you loved Lou's Cornish hens."
"I do. I'm sorry. All I can think about is that English project due this week." I look over at Ryder with a faux scowl. "We're already way behind--you've always got some excuse. We should probably work on it tonight."
"Probably so," Ryder says with an exasperated-sounding sigh.
"That's the third project the two of you have been paired up on," Mama says, shaking her head. "I hope you two can behave well enough to get your work done properly. No more arguing like the last time."
We'd pretended to fight over a calculus project. Yes, a calculus project. Is there really any such thing?
"We're trying really hard to behave," I say, shooting Ryder a sidelong glance. "Right?"
His cheeks pinken deliciously at the innuendo. I love it when Ryder blushes. Totally adorable.
"Right," he mumbles, his gaze fixed on his lap.
Laura Grace gives us both a pointed look. "You two better learn to get along, you hear? You're going to be spending a lot of time together for the next four years."
Four years. Just the two of us--away from our meddling mamas. I have to bite my lip to force back the smile that's threatening to give us away.
"She's right," Mama says, nodding. "The only way I'm allowing Jemma to go to NYU is if she promises not to go off campus without Ryder to escort her."
Escort me? What is it, the 1950s or somethin ~ Kristi Cook

It is worth recalling here that the injudicious use of rewards and praise can be pressure tactics no less than verbal or physical coercion. As we have seen, there are three dangers with motivating by means of reward and praise. First, they feed the anxiety that not the person but the desired achievement is what is valued by the parent. They directly reinforce the insecurity of the ADD child. Second, since children can sense the parents' will pushing them, even if under benign disguises such as gifts or warm words, counterwill will be strengthened. Third, praise and reward will themselves become the goal, at the expense of the child's interest in the actual process of what he is doing. Children thus motivated will sooner or later learn to get by with the least amount of effort necessary to earn the praise or the reward. Short cuts and cheating often follow. Accepting ~ Gabor Mate

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.

Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.

Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-re ~ Martin Amis

At the heart of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion - that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms. Moral ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Or maybe forgiveness is just the continual pushing aside of bitter memories, until time dulls the hurt and the anger, and the wrong is forgotten. ~ Veronica Roth

I am so sorry," a gentle, unmistakably feminine voice interrupted.

I stiffened, knowing exactly who the voice belonged to, and consequently why Dale and Evans had adopted their hazy faces.

"It's not an interruption." Dale shook his head, standing.

"Not at all." Evans also stood, his smile was small and hopeful, his voice coaxing as though she were a skittish animal.

I knew better. Where these two yokels saw a weak, sensitive flower - an angelic pushover, ripe for the pushing - I saw an opportunist in banana-cake clothing. Let the record show, I did not roll my eyes. ~ Penny Reid

Cath ran her fingers along the cover, over the raised gold type.
Then someone else ran right into her, pushing the book into Cath's chest. Pushing two books into her chest. Cath looked up just as Wren threw an arm around her.
"They're both crying," Cath heard Reagan say. "I can't even watch."
Cath freed an arm to wrap around her sister. "I can't believe it's really over," she whispered.
Wren held her tight and shook her head. She really was crying, too. "Don't be so melodramatic, Cath," Wren laughed hoarsely. "It's never over ... It's Simon. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Maybe it was a stupid exercise, and you couldn't grow things in winter. But there was something I liked about he idea of those seeds, buried so deep, having at least a chance to emerge. Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked so hard, all alone, to grow. ~ Sarah Dessen

Those entering the Saloon Bar of the 'The Midnight Bell' from the street came through a large door with a fancifully frosted glass pane, a handle like a dumb-bell a brass inscription 'Saloon Bar and Lounge,' and a brass adjuration to Push. Anyone temperamentally so wilful, careless, or incredulous as to ignore this friendly admonition was instantly snubbed, for this door would only succumb to Pushing. Nevertheless hundreds of temperamental people nightly argued with this door and got the worst of it. Given proper treatment, however, it swung back in the most accomplished way, and announced you to the Saloon Bar with a welcoming creak. ~ Patrick Hamilton

And winning; that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You drop that load too when you find yourself an excuse."
...
And Bert seemed to relax, knowing he had scored, had pushed his way through Eddie's consciousness and through his defenses, although Eddie still only partly understood all of what Bert had said, and was already prepared to rationalize the truth out of what he did understand. But Bert had suddenly quit pushing, and seemed now to be merely relaxing with his drink. "That's your problem," he said. ~ Walter Tevis

The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn - when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public.

It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be 'win- win.' And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy - Walmart, FedEx, GM - were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.

This alignment of economic interests - combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as 'serious' in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line - fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter - root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profita ~ Naomi Klein

She was so warm, her drenched clothes had almost dried. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. She started muttering, and I could've sworn she said, "Dung balls. Time to roll the dung balls."
It might've been funny - except for the fact that she was dying.
"That's Khepri talking," Setne explained. "He's the divine dung beetle, rolling the sun across the sky."
I didn't want to process that - the idea that the girl I liked had been possessed by a dung beetle and was now having dreams about pushing a giant sphere of flaming poo across the sky. ~ Rick Riordan

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. ~ Harry Harrison

Dolphins... Yeah, dolphins... A lot of people like dogs, cats, and - for some reason I've never been able to fathim - even snakes and toads. But dolphins? Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY loves bloody dolphins. Don't they? Goes way back, to the ancient Greeks, when shipwrecked sailors would wash up on beaches yammering out crazy stories of how they was staring down a watery grave, when out of nowhere, flipper shows up and pushes them safely back to the shore. Heartarming - and say what you will about aquatic mammal public relations, but that was one ispired move, because here we are two thousand years later and everybody still loves them bloody dolphins. What you don't hear are the other stories, the ones where flipper's watching poor Artemides doggy paddling away and inhaling the warm, salty waters of the Adriatic... and flipper things, "Yeah, sure I could save him, but sod that for a can of sardines" and instead of pushing Artemides back to shore, flipper pushes the poor sod out to sea... in the immortal words of Sir Johnny of the Cash, "Just to watch him die..." See, moral is, if you're gonna be a bastard, be like a dolphin - think big picture, protect your image and above all, leave no trace. Because in the bloodshot, bleary eyes of the world, once you're a bastard, you're always a bastard. ~ Simon Oliver

For most of my 20s, I looked like I was 12. Now that I'm pushing 40, I guess I look closer to ... 15? It must be my macrobiotic diet. Oh, wait, except that I don't have one of those. ~ Gabriel Mann

Just admit your pussy is weeping for my cock."

"Sure," she says, pushing her round ass back against my straining dick. "Just as soon as you admit your cock is dying to get inside my pussy."

Son of a bitch. As much as I want to make her come, proving the command I have over her body, I can't reward her bratty behavior. That's okay, though. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's playing the long game.

"So stubborn," I say in admonishment. Pulling out of her, I finger-paint a path down the side of her neck with her own arousal, then lap it up with my tongue - fuck, she tastes good - nice and slow, ending with a nip to her earlobe. Her sharp inhale makes my dick twitch before she spins around to face me. ~ Gina L. Maxwell

Trey Gate's maternal grandmother, Adelle Maxwell, was also an important influence on him, encouraging him to read as much as possible, pushing him to excel in all that he did, challenging him to use his mind. They played card games together frequently, especially games like Concentration that required mental agility. ~ James Wallace

I haven't forgotten one second of how good it felt to hold you, but I wasn't the one who pulled away. You don't want me to be more, do you? I just keep pushing against your walls, and to tell you the truth, baby, my hands are starting to bleed. do you want me gone for good? Look at me, tell me to leave you alone, and I will. I swear I'll get in my truck, drive off, and never bother you again."

--Tommy to Shea ~ Jo Davis

I groan as I lose all my ability to hold back, and I lower my head while pushing her dress and bra down in unison to allow way for my mouth to close over the hard little nub. ~ C.M. Owens

Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback - even if it destroys what you thought was good. ~ Cal Newport

There are those nights wehn you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one iwll ever kiss your lips again. ~ Robert McLiam Wilson

I have to second Gran's thanks for not giving up on me."
"I did consider it a few times," she teased. "But you can be such an engaging fellow that I never considered it for long."
"And there was all that encouragement from my siblings," he said. "All their little machinations to help our romance along."
He had the satisfaction of watching his wife blush very prettily. "I didn't have anything to do with that. I had no idea they were trying to 'push you' anywhere."
"Of course you didn't. You don't have an ounce of guile in your entire body. But I knew what they were doing."
She blinked at him. "You did?"
"My siblings are as transparent as that fetching night rail you put on every evening."
"If you knew, why didn't you fight them?"
"Because they were pushing me in a direction I wanted to go."
"That's very sweet, but I'm sure you had no desire to marry until-"
"From the moment I met you, sweetheart, I could tell I was in trouble. I didn't acknowledge it, but on some level I sensed it. When a man first sees the thing he never realized he wanted, he knows it instantly. He just doesn't always know how to get it."
She laughed. "Oh, I think you figured out very quickly how to get it. You just kissed me until I stopped kneeing you in the privates, and after that I was putty in your hands."
"So that's the secret, is it?" Reaching over, he hauled her onto his lap. "Now I know how I'll be spending my afternoon."
Her eyes gle ~ Sabrina Jeffries

Everyone wanted to be the best. Best student. Best servant. Best Christian. They got caught up in it, pressing and pushing until they forgot whom it was they were trying to please. ~ Francine Rivers

As a Magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards is pretty simple: It's practice, it's training and it's experimenting while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me. ~ David Blaine

But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why ... didn't a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape? ~ Jodi Picoult

I meant what I said about sex."
His hand slid all the way up her leg, pushing what little skirt was still covering her out of the way, holding it in a bunch at her belly button. Her nudity was fully exposed to his gaze and he looked his fill, breathing out hard.
"Who said anything about sex?"
He leaned in, his mouth dropping to the pale slice of skin between where his hand held her skirt and the thatch of hair between her legs. She wasn't trimmed as was the fashion among the women he usually took to his bed but Troy was not a fussy guy and here, under the stars, his head filling with the musky scent of her arousal, au naturel seemed fitting.
The ragged pant of her breathing stuttered into the air as he lazily stroked his tongue down.
Down. Down. Down.
She roused. Shifted. Raised herself up on her elbows, her abs tightening, her thighs tensing. "I think you'll find that still counts," she said, obviously throwing one last-ditch effort into denying herself the pleasure she so clearly craved.
He chuckled low, his warm breath fanning her belly, satisfied to feel gooseflesh stippling the soft skin. "If you think this is sex, you need to read some more textbooks, doc. ~ Amy Andrews

I tell my coach all the time "Hey, listen, coach. You know the hardest person on me isn't you, right? It's me." I'm the hardest person on myself, my biggest critic, always pushing. But there are days when I have to tell myself, "Relax, breathe, you're too stressed out." When it's no longer fun, when it's no longer something you can tolerate, that's when you have to take a break. ~ Jonathan Horton

The whole system is under tremendous strain. Although the increasing pace of change is essential for developing new solutions, it is also pushing society to its limits. In global structures, it all comes to a head in the form of sudden crises. This leads to tipping point situations in which the seemingly impossible becomes possible. ~ Franz Josef Radermacher

Do you really want me to show you how you're pushing me, Tessnia? What you do to me? ~ Jalpa Williby