Quotes About Effort

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy in meditation.

Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.

Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.

Why do men insist on achieving something? Would it not be better if they stood still under the sun in calm and silent immobility? What is there to accomplish? Why so much effort and ambition? Man has forgotten the meaning of silence.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

It takes as much stress to be a success as it does to be a failure.

Luck is not chance, it's toil fortune's expensive smile is earned.

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.

This was real life - no magic, only practice, commitment, and labor. This lesson, about life, about art, is one I am still learning.

Luck is not chance, it is toil. Fortune is expensive smile is earned.

Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed.

In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in early society are more or less military merits), but they would not be very much better, for the lowest steps in the ladder of civilization are very steep, and the effort to mount them is slow and tedious.

My years have limped; but I Have tried so hard to fly! And now, suppose Death brings Gulls' wings At last, for me to keep?

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

Life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.

Work is the price which is paid for reputation.

Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.

Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized.

If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs possess great moral force.

these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on a life when life has no shape