You are attempting to reconcile things which are opposite in their natures. [ Horace ]

To endeavour to work upon the vulgar with fine sense is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor. [ Pope ]

It is the height of folly to throw up attempting because you have failed. Failures are wonderful elements in developing the character. [ Anon ]

How many of these minds are there to whom scarcely any good can be done! They have no excitability. You are attempting to kindle a fire of stone. You must leave them as you find them, in permanent mediocrity. [ John Foster ]

Without attempting a formal definition of the word, I am inclined to consider rhetoric, when reduced to a system in books, as a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communications by language, and designed to make it efficient. [ W. E. Channing ]

If you attempt to beat a man down and to get his goods for less than a fair price, you are attempting to commit burglary, as much as though you broke into his shop to take the things without paying for them. There is cheating on both sides of the counter, and generally less behind it than before it. [ Beecher ]

Oceans of ink, reams of paper, and disputes infinite, might have been spared, if wranglers had avoided lighting the torch of strife at the wrong end; since a tenth part of the pains expended in attempting to prove the why, the where, and the when, certain events have happened, would have been more than sufficient to prove that they never happened at all. [ Colton ]