Quotes About Effort

Though sluggards deem it but a foolish chase, And marvel men should quit their easy chair, The toilsome way, and long, long leagues to trace, Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air, And life that bloated Ease can never hope to share.

She loved her lord or thought so, but that love   Cost her an effort, which is a sad toil, The stone of Sisyphus, if once we move   Our feelings 'gainst the nature of the soil. She had nothing to complain of or reprove,   No bickerings, no connubial turmoil; Their union was a model to behold, Serene and noble, conjugal, but cold.

Without struggle, no progress and no result. Every breaking of habit produces a change in the machine.

Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today. Quite the reverse, if a man did nothing yesterday, no demands are made upon him today; if he did anything yesterday, it means that he must do more today. This certainly does not mean that it is better to do nothing. Whoever does nothing receives nothing.

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.

It is natural to feel helpless when attempting the impossible.

Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree.

The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.

In the long run, the war against mastery, the path of patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results, is a war that can't be won.

If you don't burn out at the end of each day, you're a bum.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

Q. Why don't they work harder? A. They just don't like hard work. The Germans have a reputation for hard work, so they like to keep it up. The British find it boring.

The final reason is purely practical and based on sound economic assessment. Whether we work or not makes hardly any difference. So it is only sensible to save electricity, coal, administration, fares and effort.

No, I was never one of those positive people who believes he can have whatever he sets his sights on. I just kept working at it.

Evolutionary biologists have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life.

Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult

Always do more than is required of you.

Even the finest of jugglers cannot keep a hundred balls in the air forever.

Me, I only try. I'm not one like Moses, or Solon—or, or—Lycurgus.

My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.

You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.

Any act can be a prayer, if done as well as we are able.

The nights are too long,' he told Missandei, 'and there is much and more to do, always.