Quotes About Effort

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things

As an answer on any test, the best of you will always be better than the least of you.

Fate and time may conspire to fade your youthful shimmer but you must constantly perspire in order to insure your shine.

How did I get here? I'm not rich. Not a mutant. Not a genius. Not a natural. I just try harder. I always have.

The world is full of things we can't control. All we can do is keep trying, keep working.

I slipped on through, slicker than whale shit through an ice floe.

he dove for it, they'd

Housework can look like a Sisyphean task that gives you no sense of reward or completion .

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

It's folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?

We don't reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.

Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.

You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.

Writing is hard for every last one of us… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do.

The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.

there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything.

Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

the work you do each day matters. Even if it's work that seems invisible. Even if it's work that doesn't lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.

It's that the work you do each day matters. Even if it's work that seems invisible. Even if it's work that doesn't lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.