Quotes About Effort

We don't use phones anymore in this day and age, yet she still phones things in.

If I'm going to fail, I want to fail trying.

We succeed, not alone by the laborious exertions of our faculties, be they small or great, but by the regular, thoughtful and systematic exercise of them.

No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

What is the point of labor saving if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)

And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease of understanding, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work." Excerpt From The World-Ending Fire Wendell Berry This material may be protected by copyright.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. Right is difficult and long. In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

We were created to be fully human - a lifetime effort - and using our minds intelligently and reverently is essential to full humanhood. But Rushdie talks throughout of making something sacred, whereas there is another kind of sacrality that exists of its own right.

We have worked all day to tidy the mess you have made.

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?

Whenever a woman tries to put you out of temper, turn the tables, and put HER out of temper instead. They are generally prepared for every effort you can make in your own defence, but that. One word does it as well as a hundred; and one word did it with Limping Lucy. I looked her pleasantly in the face; and I said—Pooh!

The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. I loved her.

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing, he said. All people are good except those who are idle.

to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of strength.

If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?

struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress

The lazy will always attribute genius to some 'inspiration' that comes for mere waiting.

Some people float through life while the rest of us pull the barge.

And I watered it in fears, Night and morning with my tears; And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles.

I sometimes try to be miserable that I may do more work, but find it is a foolish experiment. Happinesses have wings and wheels; miseries are leaden legged, and their whole employment is to clip the wings and to take off the wheels of our chariots. We determine, therefore, to be happy and do all we can, tho' not all that we would. - Letter to William Hayley, 26th November 1800

President Theodore Roosevelt offered a definition of success that has stood the test of time. "Far and away the best prize that life offers," he said, "is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.