Quotes About Effort

Success in any endeavor does not happen by accident. Rather, it's the result of deliberate decisions, conscious effort, and immense persistence...all directed at specific goals.

I think she's trying. Trying what? She's trying to figure it out. Aren't we all? No, I don't think so.

Images discovered by men evolve slowly, painfully; hence Jacques Bousquet's profound remark: A new image costs humanity as much labor as a new characteristic costs a plant.

To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort.

S]ometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.

It is far easier to get all the good things that our lives have to offer than it is to deserve them. We seldom have much joy of them, however, unless we deserve them.

Catch Catodon … cast out his conation.

since the only way to avoid giving into depression and despair is to do something, even something you hate, anything in fact, I force myself to keep bashing away at something, anything.

That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things.

Again, I did what I could. I didn't doubt, and didn't deny, that there were people who could have done a better job than me, people with more skill and experience, but I played the hand I was given, dealt with the problem, and the person, in front of me, and at least I felt reasonably sure I was doing no harm.

But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope naïve perhaps that we'll make a better job of it next time. Unless you're a genius or a fool you realize that everything you write however "successful " is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.

Human courtship, like courtship in other animals, has a typical time-course. Courtship effort is low when first assessing a sexual prospect, increases rapidly if the prospect reciprocates one's interest, peaks when the prospect is deciding whether to copulate, and declines once a long-term relationship is established.

So, when women universally complain about their slothfully mute boyfriends, we learn two things. First, women have a universal desire to enjoy receiving high levels of verbal courtship effort. Second, high levels of verbal courtship effort are so costly that men have evolved to produce them only when they are necessary for initiating or reviving sexual relationships.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Making Life means making trouble

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

if there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.