Quotes About Effort

What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It's up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.

And very few people have great natural ability. Everyone else—and this is true of most players these days—is in the middle: On a given day, a guy is a world-beater, then the next day he's just not there.

What happiness to work a lot and forget everything!

Hard things are hard.

I will never be disappointed if you strike out swinging. That means you tried.

Anna isn't impressed by Baker's efforts in the kitchen. In her world, each dawning day is merely another chance to eat pizza.

It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.

But those who try, know that strength and knowledge come with doing.

Lai Tsin immediately set about his work.

Good aims not always make good books.

My spring is broken, and a separate exertion is necessary for the lifting up of each — and then it falls down again. I never felt so before: there is no wonder that I should feel so now. Nevertheless, I don't give up much to the pernicious languor — the tendency to lie down to sleep among the snows of a weary journey — I don't give up much to it. Only I find it sometimes at the root of certain negligences — for instance, of this toward you.

The struggle with me has been a very painful one; I cannot enter on the how and wherefore at this moment. I had expected more help than I have found, and am left to myself, and thrown so on my own sense of duty as to feel it right, for the sake of future years, to make an effort to stand by myself as I best can. At the same time, I will not tell you that at the last hour something may not happen to keep me at home.

one must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.

Politeness counts the effort, or so one of my clademothers used to say.

I'm an M.D. A shitty one, but sometimes shitty is better than nothing. I'll do what I have to do.

The wall stood firm behind him; his hands flattened on the stones, but they gave him no purchase and less strength.

I had the skills, and making myself hate them would have been a real waste of time and energy.

There was no grand design behind any of it: just a series of fumbling attempts to do something.

I made a grab for the fabric of the universe and hauld myself into a stable orientation.

It didn't matter because it was out of my control, and my energy needed to go to things that I could control, or at least hope to affect the outcome of.

Sometimes, laziness was the next best thing to genius.

I think you did try to save him for you loved him. And he failed to be saved because he loved himself.

She said she could do it. Either she can, or she can't, and riding her about it just wastes everyone's time.

Change is a result of what you do now, not what you intend to do tomorrow.