Quotes About Effort

Bess who has been fingering a fruit-lid jar lid — absently, heedlessly dropped it — aimlessly groping across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! ... Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement. satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my powers; I! I!

To cheer myself up, I try to remember the difference between short-term and long-term success. Living a good life and making a real mark on society is a marathon, not a sprint.

enough pieces of cheese and you can be fairly sure that the

isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:

We waste time searching for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Hoping is what people do when they're too lazy to do anything else. People

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.

luck is often little more than raw talent combined with the ability to make the most of opportunities.

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

We cannot fail to win—unless we fail to try.

Things were going well. Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit.

but cranes can

And then I realized it was what the Arabs call inshallah: "It is not mine to do; it's mine to do the best I can; it's going to happen according to God's

We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!

What are the deeds of heroes, except a few frightened people doing the best they can in the circumstances?

I should hate to be employed and have no time for my needlework and my painting and playing the piano and seeing people. I find I have little enough spare time as it is. Rubbish, caro, one can find time for important things if one makes an effort. conversation between Georgie and Lucia

That's life and track though; you work hard for just a few chances

Effort is the path to mastery, so let's at least give this a try.

Creative confidence is like a muscle—it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience.

Qualifying an opportunity at the outset helps you determine whether it's worth pursuing at all, and, if it is, with how much effort.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.

What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.