Quotes About Effort

First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me.

At sunrise it always seems like you've got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn't.

So much human effort went into alteration of non-essential components

Like a mule team in harness.

But he went right back to it, trying again. He would do this over and over until he had it, and today or tomorrow he would walk. Willa remembered all this. She'd watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

The Doughroaster resents the idea of people being able to stand on the top of a mountain without ever having been able to climb up there. Seems like cheating somehow.

It seemed he'd recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.

The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat, an army instructor once told me, and I've never forgotten the lesson.

He was almost gone. The abbot knelt and placed a small jade Buddha in the pawnbroker's hands and began to pray for his miserable soul. Fang's eyes opened one last time, and he looked blindly down at the jade Buddha, and he made a truly heroic effort. "Cheap, very cheap," he sneered. "No more than two hundred…." Then he too was dead.

We all, to some extent, reinvent ourselves. Jeffrey (Archer) has just gone to a bit more trouble.

The reason of football is not to be the best but to be the best team

Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies.

The key point is that maximizers aspire to achieve that goal. Thus, they spend a great deal of time and effort on the search, reading labels, checking out consumer magazines, and trying new products.

Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects.   It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.  

When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.

To remind yourself of your intentions and get yourself into the spirit of your dreams, read through your dream journal at bedtime. Learning to remember your dreams may take particular effort at first, but if you persist, you will almost certainly succeed—and may find yourself effortlessly remembering four or more dreams per night.

If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one;

behind all great achievement there lies great toil: nothing that is worth doing is done easily."41

The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement." —Aristotle, from The Nicomachean Ethics

people are working harder than ever, but because they lack clarity and vision, they aren't getting very far. They, in essence, are pushing a rope...with all of their might.

It's not enough to dream. It's not enough to try. It's not enough to set goals or climb ladders. It's not enough to value. The effort has to be based on practical realities that produce the result. Only then can we dream, set goals, and work to achieve them with confidence.

The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do," he observed. "They don't like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.

When we set and achieve goals that are in our Center of Focus, we maximize the use of our time and effort. Interestingly, we find that as we do this over time, our Circle of Influence automatically increases. We find positive ways to influence more people and circumstances.

To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don't pay the price day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.