Quotes on Effort

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard 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.

I went to the trash pile at Tuskegee Institute and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing I found I could use. ... [The early efforts were] worked out almost wholly on top of my flat topped writing desk and with teacups, glasses, bottles and reagents I made myself.

The game has its ups and downs, but you can never lose focus of your individual goals and you can't let yourself be beat because of lack of effort.

It requires an effort of logical acrobatics to believe that carnage of innocents is an instrument for freedom and elections are a symbol of deception and repression!

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful.

Could I be assured that America would remain virtuous, I would venture to defy the utmost Efforts of Enemies to subjugate her.

Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.

Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, there is massive Islamic condemnation of the United States.

Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.

Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by a thunderbolt and it'll just leave you stunned.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.