We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
Interpretation
Valuable achievements require consistent effort and hard work.
William James emphasizes that nothing truly worthwhile in life comes without hard work. The quote suggests that in order to obtain and enjoy the good things in life, one must be willing to put in the daily effort, persistence, and determination that such goals require.
In practice
This quote can inspire a team during a challenging project meeting.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
The more pressure you bring from without, the less internal pressure is necessary.
Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
Go ahead and do what you really love to do! Do nothing else! You have so little time. How can you think of wasting a moment doing something for a living you don't like to do? What kind of a living is that? That is not a living, that is a dying!
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.
People are not afraid of failure, they're afraid of blame.
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