Quotes About Effort

Writing isn't hard; no harder than ditch-digging.

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.

All that stands between the college graduate and the top of the ladder is the ladder.

If at first you do succeed, try, try not to be insufferable.

Hope, not fear, is the creative principle in human affairs... Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled with life and hope and joy, able to bear their part in bringing to mankind a future less somber than the past, with faith in the glory that human effort can create.

A struggle to do something more than exist is the sign of human life — the mission of the human soul.

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.

Those humble, quiet, behind-the-scenes people are the reason anything ever gets done.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Always give 100% — unless you're donating blood.

Split your own wood, and it will warm you twice.

It is the fight alone that please us, not the victory.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good.

If you're going to have a bad attitude, you may as well not even tee it up that week because you probably won't play good anyways.

Preparation + Attitude + Opportunity + Action = Luck.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative'.

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

Those who can hear the whisper as you heard it will have to make a decision in the struggle. Will they part with some hard earned bucks to buy the book or pass it by? See, they get to make a choice in the struggle with their own free will and they have to put some effort into the struggle to get the book, just like you did. Will they choose right or will they choose wrong? It's a fork in the path of their existence that they face and no one can give them a free ride down the right path.

Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we're forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.

Nobody wants to work. Not even the breath wants to work.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Isn't that what usually happens? You know who did it, but you have to work your butts off to the knowledge into proof.