Quotes About Effort

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

I did everything I could." Tears scalded Alienor's eyes. "But it was not enough.

Lukas are piled up like firewood for the competitive flames of my profession, I thought.

Even when you're flying high and steady, the weight doesn't go away—it's just balanced by lift. I have worked pretty hard over the past year and a half to keep my life in balance. But the weight's still there, waiting for an increase in gravity to pull me earthward again.

It takes a lot of work to put together a marriage, to put together a family and a home.

But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.

People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.

It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.

It's only the immortal thing that a man can be judged on, that bit of himself that he makes as he does the best he can with what fate handed out to him.

What we are made to do we seldom do well, what we do of our own choice we make a success of for very pride.

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity.

Then for some reason I've not done it properly one day, and that's no good at all, because if you're going to do something that's for your own benefit, you've got to do it properly or there's no point.

Why does getting ahead always have to involve getting up early?

The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down.

Ich meine, wenn uns etwas nicht gelingt, bleibt uns noch genügend Zeit, es noch mal zu versuchen.

at the time of my visit he still had failed to

School is just like having a job. You have to show up, you have to do your work, and you have to be around tons of idiots or mean people. Now that I think about it, it's worse than having a job. At least there you get paid.

and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed.

But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We're all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it's okay.

Dio mio», aveva aggiunto Bunny, soffiandosi il naso. «A volte mi sembra di non poter mai vincere». «Non puoi vincere», aveva risposto Henry. «Puoi solo fare del tuo meglio».