Quotes About Effort

As Yoda had expressed it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: "Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.

Because it's not perfect, let's not bother. That's crazy! Even if we take three steps forward and two and a half back it's still going half a foot forward.

I will never be as brave as him—I'm not by nature a particularly courageous person—but he showed me that I could try. And that trying might turn out to be the most important part of courage.

You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. I took this as an invitation to very little. I'm not proud of this, I'm just describing my attitude at that time, shared by most of my fellow students.

One has to be grown up enough to realize that life is not fair. You just have to do the best you can in the situation you are in.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.

You lie well, and I appreciate the effort it takes. It's not so easy, as any commissar knows.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (what ever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head.

The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high... but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.

The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

No bounce, no play.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

He used to say what you deserve has nothing to do with where you finish.

Eighty percent of success is just showing up.

Easy reading is the product of hard writing

Life is more than love and pleasure, I came to dig for treasure. If you want to play, you gotta pay, You know it's always been that way We all came digging for treasure.

You could feel weight, yes—when you were carrying too much, it made you ploddy—but wasn't it, like time, basically just a human construct? Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren't they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality?

There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.