Quotes About Effort

How" is always more important than "what." See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.

A great climb is a wonderful mixture of difficulty and intimacy.

No one ever says, "This piece of creative work is crap, but they made it in a couple of weeks, so let's go and check it out.

That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.

I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.

A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fit for, even if there's time for both.

All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.

She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!

Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.

He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...

That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seeds, but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest, she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.

he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.

Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results.

Those who always labour, can have no true judgment.

Guy thought of the Greek word agon , wasn't it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony?

Sainthood to those who labor over a hard cock in vain.

He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers. ^15

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labour;

We are measured not only by our triumphs, young man, but by our persistence. If we fail, we must try harder.

And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.