Quests Quotes

They came as quietly as rain, and went away like mists drifting. There were jests about them and songs. And the songs outlasted the jests. At last they became a legend, which haunted those farms for ever: they were spoken of when men told of hopeless quests, and held up to laughter or glory, whichever men had to give. And ~ Lord Dunsany

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Bilbo and Frodo overcome the objections of the Baggins side of themselves in order to embrace the Quests that await them. Sometimes we have the same struggles as they do. The Took in us wants to pursue dreams, and the Baggins part wants to stay safe and conventional. Too often we heed the negative thinking that convinces us that we do not have the time, money, energy, or opportunity to make our desires come true. We think we have too many other obligations blocking our way. Sometimes we also saddle ourselves with the false guilt that tells us it is not right to do anything for ourselves, especially if we have a family to take care of first. We must not abandon our true responsibilities, of course, but would it not be better if we could fulfill them in a way that fed our soul and not just our pocketbook and got us excited about going to work rather than dreading the drudgery? ~ Anne Marie Gazzolo

Most of us do not even know how to ask a question. Most of us do not see the root of the word 'question' is 'quest'. Most of us don't have a quest in our life. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

To begin is the most important part of any quest and by far the most courageous. ~ Plato

There was always a quest for more minutes, more hours, faster progress to accomplish more in each day. The simple joy of living between summers was gone. ~ Mitch Albom

A disciple said to him, "I am ready, in the quest for God , to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?" The Master calmly replied, "One's beliefs about God. ~ Anthony De Mello

To me, a king is a lighthouse. A guide who can cast his glow across his kingdom and bring every last one of us out of the shadows. A beacon who we can look up to when the world seems lost. A bridge who can unite us when our differences seem to stark to reconcile. Tonight, we need a king who is all of those things. A king who can look each of you in the eye and make you feel that you won't just fight for him or his kingdom, but you'll fight for our way of life. ~ Soman Chainani

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence. ~ Bertrand Russell

I've always been interested in the social conflict of my age, my own time, as well as the result of positive and negative of social change, and the ongoing quest we all have, from the cradle to the grave, for identity. ~ Stephanie Rothman

In the quest for fortune and fame ... don't forget about the simple things. ~ India.Arie

The wind has shifted to the East. A storm isn't far off. I can smell the moisture in the air, a fetid, living thing. Isolated drops fall, licking at my hands, my face, my dress. The quests squawk in surprise, turn their palms up to the sky as if questioning it, and dash for cover. ~ Libba Bray

My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas. ~ Jerry Uelsmann

It was weather for dreams; for little fluttering quests of the heart. ~ Knut Hamsun

At the core of Fashletics you have a woman who is committed to exploring and expressing the true meaning of strength from the inside out and that will never change. I am honored to serve a community that has proven to me over and over again that it wants to be a part of my quest to inspire positive change through physical means. ~ Sarah Wilson

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. ~ Remy De Gourmont

To a large degree, since the beginning of time, charisma or the lack of it has impacted upon those in quest of acclaim. As media expands, this has become ever more vital. Thus, demeanor if unappealing, can defeat one's likelihood of success, causing the death of prospects whilst they are still embryonic. ~ John Donne

It is love which made all this. War which protects it. With love comes responsibility and possibility, fear and hopes, quests and suffering. ~ Carrie Jones

My biggest kick comes from the individual fans I run into. Middle-aged men ask me when we're going to do more Johnny Quest cartoons. ~ Joseph Barbera

Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is no quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr. ~ Henry Suso

There are many lessons people can learn about the left. One of the key lessons is they never give anything up. Once they begin a quest, they don't stop until they've got it. The other thing that you need to learn is, they're never happy even after they succeed. They are never happy because there can never be enough to satisfy them. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire. ~ Marya Mannes

Back in the days when I was a teenager,
Before I had status, and before I had a pager,
You could find The Abstract, listening to hip-hop,
My pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop.
I said, 'Well daddy don't you know that things go in cycles.
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin' like Michael.
It's all expected, things are for the lookin',
If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin'. ~ Q-Tip

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way. ~ Greg Graffin

The greatest quest in life is to reach one's potential. ~ Mychal Wynn

You never know how a good quest is going to end. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

You have to embark on your own quest to discover why you are on this planet, what makes you get out of bed in the morning, and what you uniquely contribute to the world. ~ Danny Silk

A mediator is an impartial outsider who tries to aid the negotiators in their quest to find a compromise agreement. ~ Howard Raiffa

The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I'm always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest. ~ Susan Orlean

Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit ... each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest. ~ Joseph Campbell

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. ~ Marshall McLuhan

You are not alone in your quest to be who you want and have what you want. ~ Chris Prentiss

The quest for homeland security is heading ... toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ... If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed. ~ William Greider

It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world. ~ Jostein Gaarder

One of the best things I've read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus.
Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt. ~ Peter J. Carroll

In physiology, as in all other sciences, no discovery is useless, no curiosity misplaced or too ambitious, and we may be certain that every advance achieved in the quest of pure knowledge will sooner or later play its part in the service of man. ~ Ernest Starling

By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives. ~ Sharon Salzberg

My quest for cosmic understanding is a book I have picked up and put down many times, always forgetting to insert a bookmark. ~ Robert Breault

Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives. ~ James Altucher

Paddy was just one of many wanderers on strange, lonely quests, striking out on mysterious missions, most of whom had left no traces. ~ Nick Hunt

I write best about two things, which is evident from the cover of So Far Gone: the constant quest to understand love and money. ~ Drake

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The quest of the truth had been born in me - the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man's quests. ~ Ida Tarbell

My death is very near to me, and of this I am glad, for I desire to pursue the quest in other realms, as it has been promised to me that I shall do. ~ H. Rider Haggard

The quest for the eternal, all-beautiful, all-true and all-pure, and the quest to be close to the poor and most broken people appear to be so contradictory. And yet, in the broken heart of Christ, these two quests are united. Jesus reveals to us that he loves his Father, and is intimately linked to him; at the same time he is himself in love with each person and in a particular way with the most broken, the most suffering and the most rejected. To manifest this love, Jesus himself became broken and rejected, a man of sorrows and of anguish and of tears; he became the Crucified One.

. . . Within the church, over the ages, one or the other aspect of this double mission has been emphasized, according to the call of God in different times and places, but both are also present. There are those who are called to the desert or the mountain top to see greater union with God through the Crucified One; and their prayer will flow upon the broken and the crucified ones of this world. And there are those called together to give their lives for and with the crucified and broken ones in the world; and they will always seek a personal and mystical union with Jesus so that they may love as he loves.

Every community and every family are called to live both forms of mission, but in different ways: to pray and to be present in a special way to the smallest and the weakest within their own community or outside it, according to their individual call. ~ Jean Vanier

It's the fun part 'cause you don't have any of the real heavy-lifting to do. You just come in and shout and chew scenery, and just be awful and say a few jokes, and you don't have to carry the romantic storyline or the quest part of the story. You just pop up, every now and again. ~ Justin Theroux

With the idol of certainty (including that of degrees of imperfect certainty or probability) there falls one of the defences of obscurantism which bar the way of scientific advance. For the worship of this idol hampers not only the boldness of our questions, but also the rigour and the integrity of our tests. The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right; for it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth. ~ Karl Popper

To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions. ~ Sam Keen

The process of gathering spiritual light is the quest of a lifetime. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place - upon the killing ground. ~ Stephen King

Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

I knew that I wanted to create rich themes, and something that people might really relate to emotionally. That was the quest, authenticity, and then just to make the audience feel something. ~ John Debney

Stories have changed, my dear boy," the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. "There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey. ~ Erin Morgenstern

There's people who do things and people who never do - who say they will someday, but they just don't. I want to go on a quest. I've always wanted to go on a quest. And now that I have one, I'm not backing down from it. I'm not going home until it's complete. ~ Holly Black

All of us--bright atheists and committed religionists--need to wake now and hear the earth call . . . . We need to give and receive as love shows us how, join with each pilgrim who quests for the true, give heed to the voices of the suffering, awaken our consciences with justice as our guide, and work toward a planet transformed by our care. ~ Scotty McLennan

The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man. ~ Weston La Barre

I'm not motivated by vanity, glory or the quest for power. ~ Michele Bachmann

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center. ~ Christina Baldwin

The longest journey
Is the journey inwards.
Of him who has chosen his destiny,
Who has started upon his quest
For the source of his being." page 58
The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them." page 62 ~ Dag Hammarskjold

It is true that the successful quest for wisdom might lead to the result that wisdom is not the one thing needful. But this result would owe its relevance to the fact that it is the result of the quest for wisdom: the very disavowal of reason must be reasonable disavowal. ~ Leo Strauss

Quests always have their ups and downs,' rumbled the giant. 'The point is never to give up, even if you're falling off a cliff. You never know what might happen on the way to the bottom. ~ Nancy Farmer

Someone says 'inauguration' in my line of work, and you can just bet there'll be freaky shit. It's like quests. You get told to 'go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny' and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won't have just been left down the back of the sofa. ~ Kate Griffin

The artist's quest is to succeed in combining and balancing all compositional attributes and physical elements into those that are purely spiritual. That is the secret of art. ~ Edward J. Fraughton

In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes. ~ Matsuo Basho

Being a scientist is a special privilege: for it brings the opportunity to be creative, the passionate quest for answers to nature's most precious secrets, and the warm friendships of many valued colleagues. ~ Stanley B. Prusiner

For more than two centuries since winning our own freedom, we the people of the United States have repeatedly answered the call to lead the quest for freedom around the globe. ~ Mac Thornberry

I refuse to accept that the shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom. ~ Kailash Satyarthi

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city's underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It's long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That's what we're after, isn't it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel's length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains? ~ Ander Monson

Every living being longs always to be happy, untainted by sorrow; and everyone has the greatest love for himself, which is solely due to the fact that happiness is his real nature. Hence, in order to realize that inherent and untainted happiness, which indeed he daily experiences when the mind is subdued in deep sleep, it is essential that he should know himself. For obtaining such knowledge the inquiry 'Who am I?' in quest of the Self is the best means. ~ Ramana Maharshi

No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step. ~ Angela Davis

The words madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being. ~ Immanuel Kant

Always engage in the quest for life's meaning, which is inner peace. ~ Longchenpa

In God there is no duality. In that Presence "I" and "we" and "you" do not exist. "I" and "you" and "we" and "He" become one ... Since in the Unity there is no distinction, the Quest and the Way and the Seeker become one. ~ Mahmud Shabistari

I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire. ~ Ignatius Of Antioch

The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit. ~ Noam Chomsky

The hobbit is hallowed for his terrible and grace-filled journey and hollowed out by it. His body seems too small for all that he endures but not so his heart. Fear, fatigue, cold, hunger, and thirst torment him, but he continues out of love. Frodo's struggle shows that there are, in fact, two quests going on: his to destroy the Ring and the Ring's to dominate and destroy him. Despite the despair that it causes, which both fills and empties him, the Ring-bearer remains as intent upon saving everyone as Denethor is not. Frodo's torn heart still beats, and it pushes past terror and hopelessness because of Sam's blessed aid and his own battered and bleeding will to do so. Both hobbits teach us the great value of redemptive suffering. ~ Anne Marie Gazzolo

Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance. ~ Alan Hirsch

It's never the world at large you want to prove yourself to. It's someone in particular. Doesn't matter how old you get, you're still hoping for Mom or Dad to kiss you on the head.
And yes, that person should ideally be yourself, just as the answers to all our questions and the objects of our quests should most likely be found within our own souls. But they're not. We need more. Someone or something bigger than us. A magical other.
And that's why we reach for the gods.
Or for someone to love. ~ Michael Rutger

With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire. ~ Justin Sane

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future. ~ Daniel Dennett

There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things ~ Erin Morgenstern

If flurries be the food of quests, snow on. ~ Ian Doescher

In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin.
Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist's or a farmer's skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running "heritage quests." We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate. ~ Ellen Meloy

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Positive belief leaves no room for excuses; it questions why the feats and quests cannot be attained. When your beliefs are strong enough, you will not define yourself on the basis of past and present limitations or life events. Your success can only be as big as the size of your beliefs, for it is the size of your beliefs that will either limit your dream or allow it to explode. ~ Archibald Marwizi

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion. ~ Samuel Butler

The search for the new black is one of the most elusive quests known to man. It's rumored that Christopher Columbus once searched for the new black and simply gave up. Yet every season we are convinced that some magical chromatic fabric will usurp black as the king of fashion, only to realize later that black still reigns supreme. ~ Ashton Kutcher

This present system by which industry is motivated exclusively by the quest for maximal profits - though it may have helped a great deal to develop, to industrialize our country so rapidly and so successfully - now it's clearly passed its usefulness. It is keeping us from achieving the ideal society that we should have. We say industry must produce to improve the quality of life for all our people. ~ Benjamin Spock

Soul Mountain, the story of one man's quest for inner peace and freedom. ~ Gao Xingjian

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

There is divine beauty in learning ... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you. ~ Elie Wiesel

I'm on a quest to claim absolute victory on every front. ~ Charlie Sheen

The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition. ~ Michel De Montaigne

If pinpointing God's presence were really that simple, then he supposed the beaches would be more crowded in the mornings. They would be filled with people on their own quests, instead of people jogging or walking their dogs or fishing in the surf. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for the ideal, and desire for the soul's mystical fire. Self-satisfaction because of some material accomplishment will never be for me. The truly great are those who quest for better spiritual selves. ~ Isabelle Eberhardt

None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades. ~ Paul Rogat Loeb