Quotes About Effort

The man on top of the mountain didn't fall there.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

You have to pay the price to win and you have to pay the price to get to the point where success is possible. Most important, you must pay the price to stay there.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

Stupid women, and all are stupid, think the first winning of the man the final victory. Then they settle down and grow fat, and stale, and dead, and heartbroken. Alas, they are so stupid. But you, little infant-woman with your first victory, you must make your love-life an unending chain of victories. Each day you must win your man again. And when you have won the last victory, when you can find no more to win, then ends love. Finis is written, and your man wanders in strange gardens.

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing well whatever you do, without a thought of fame.

Labor with what zeal we will, Something still remains undone, Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun.

Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.

Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.

Each day is a branch of the Tree of Life laden heavily with fruit. If we lie down lazily beneath it, we may starve; but if we shake the branches, some of the fruit will fall for us.

If you get to it, And you cannot do it, There you jolly-well are, Aren't you?

Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable. However, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

Sometimes, Angie thought, the difference between heaven and hell was people. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, you made no difference at all.

Do the best you can with yourself and hope for the best.

What people don't like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick.

Most things worth doing are difficult,

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Sometimes you knew changes needed to be made but just couldn't summon up the energy to make them.

I'm trying my best, but I feel like such a spare part.

Honestly, you tried your best and sometimes everything worked out perfectly. Other times, it went all horribly wrong.

But you make of it [life] what you can, and you do your best to enjoy the hell out of it, because it's the only life you get.