Effort Quotes

1. "Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it's not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues."
Author: Al Jarreau

2. "Sometimes being happy takes effort. Invest time and energy in yourself and your happiness."
Author: Amy Leigh Mercree

3. "All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken."
Author: Anaïs Nin

4. "What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?"
Author: Andre Dubus

5. "A strenuous effort must be made to train young people to think for themselves and take independent charge of their lives."
Author: Anne Sullivan

6. "I don't expect the press to say thank you for the efforts that I make."
Author: Ari Fleischer

7. "To pass the time, I made valiant strides in my effort to read Ulysses, but feared I was losing the war. A hundred pages in, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that James Joyce might have been an asshole, and by Nebraska I was in a foul mood."
Author: B. Justin Shier

8. "With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore."
Author: Barbara Brown Taylor

9. "First dates are like homeless vagrants: despite all efforts to avoid them, they're always at McDonalds and you end up without any spare change."
Author: Bauvard

10. "As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things... happened. Some kind of souped-up princess with a credit card. I didn't have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most important, finding out what I was good at and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do about at some point, and that I really shouldn't worry about them. I didn't worry about what I was going to do. What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all of my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things."
Author: Caitlin Moran

11. "Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride."
Author: Charles Frazier

12. "In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street."
Author: Charles Simic

13. "Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way." For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. "It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?"
Author: Clive Barker

14. "The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

15. "All effort to bring order into disorder is disorder."
Author: David Bohm

16. "Facts are accumulated by effort, but truth reveals itself effortlessly."
Author: David Hawkins

17. "Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker."
Author: David Mixner

18. "Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make."
Author: Eckhart Tolle

19. "Even when you're 50, you can make the effort to improve your standards."
Author: Edmund Hillary

20. "He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation."
Author: Eugen Herrigel

21. "Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

22. "Even if, by some especially unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of stepmotherly nature, [the good will] should be wholly lacking in the power to accomplish its purpose; if with the greatest effort it should yet achieve nothing, and only the good will should remain (not, to be sure, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), yet would it, like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself."
Author: Immanuel Kant

23. "The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth."
Author: Jacques Barzun

24. "It is always the start that requires the greatest effort."
Author: James Cash Penney

25. "Holiness requires continual effort on our part and continual nourishing and strengthening by the Spirit."
Author: Jerry Bridges

26. "I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe"
Author: Jonathan Tropper

27. "You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back."
Author: Joy Williams

28. "Maxon, this is my gift to you. I promise I will make every effort to see these girls through your eyes. Not the eyes of a queen, or the eyes of your mother, but yours. Even if the girl you choose is of a very low caste, even if others think she has no value, I will always listen to your reasons for wanting her. And I will do my best to support your choice."
Author: Kiera Cass

29. "To every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every administrator finds the chief rewards for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark, resting his pole against the ship of the people and moving along with it, that his efforts are moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move my itself, and then the delusion is no longer possible. The ship follows its own enormous, independent course, the pole does not reach the moving ship, and the ruler suddenly, from his position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and feeble human being."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

30. "If he could have his way, Satan would distract us from our heritage. He would have us become involved in a million and one things in this life–probably none of which is very important in the long run–to keep us from concentrating on the things that are really important, particularly the reality that we are God's children. He would like us to forget about home and family values. He'd like to keep us so busy with comparatively insignificant things that we don't have time to make the effort to understand where we came from, whose children we are, and how glorious our ultimate homecoming can be!"
Author: Marvin J. Ashton

31. "It seems to me we are losing our way in an effort to get the ratings."
Author: Matt Drudge

32. "The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others."
Author: Milan Kundera

33. "The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

34. "If only it was effortless to understand you because if it wasn't so. . .there wouldn't be any point to be by your side... —kakeru manabe"
Author: Natsuki Takaya

35. "Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price."
Author: Oriana Fallaci

36. "We made a successful, last-minute effort to get the French Open many years ago, when the USA network bailed on it. I remember, four of us jumped on a plane on the spur of the moment to cover it. I think we had someone draw up a sign (by hand) that we could hold up in front of the camera to tell viewers that it was ESPN coverage."
Author: Patrick McEnroe

37. "I felt strongly that since the pursuit of good science was so difficult it was essential that the problem being studied was an important one to justify the effort expanded."
Author: Paul Nurse

38. "I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist."
Author: Richard Cobden

39. "The events of the day's march are now becoming so dreary and dispiriting that one longs to forget them when we camp; it is an effort even to record them in a diary."
Author: Robert Falcon Scott

40. "A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance."
Author: Robert Musil

41. "Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person.Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do."
Author: Saul Bellow

42. "But you're so easy to sneak up on." He crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall. "You should be honored that I bother, since there's no challenge to it.""Right," I said dryly.Tybalt has never made a secret of his contempt for changelings in general and me in particular. Not even the years I spent missing could change that. If anything, it made things worse, because when I came back, I promptly removed myself from all the places he was accustomed to finding me. Hating me suddenly took effort - an effort he's proved annoying glad to make. On the other hand, it's actually been something of a relief, because it is something I can count on. Dawn comes, the moon rises and Tybalt hates me."
Author: Seanan McGuire

43. "She already told me that she doesn't have to be nice, so why do I? Because my mother raised me right? That's why wolves always win. Because the rest of us mind our manners and get devoured for our efforts."
Author: Sheryl J. Anderson

44. "Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences."
Author: Stafford Cripps

45. "I made a concerned effort to focus. There was something I needed to say. The most important thing.I love you," I said, but it sounded like singing. My voice rang and shimmered like a bell.As i love you,"He told me."
Author: Stephenie Meyer

46. "I am extremely proud of my service with the government and my efforts to help safeguard public health and protect our country against the scourge of offensive biological warfare."
Author: Steven Hatfill

47. "As her lungs pumped and her head cleared, she wondered if all the effort she'd put into blotting out the pain had deadened her ability to feel pleasure, too. What a shame. What a loss."
Author: Susan Donovan

48. "Because I feel 'Thor' is the beginning of finding my roots, and I found that I have family in America, I want to take my time and put effort on my future work so that foreign people get to know me better, and I also want to enjoy that process itself!"
Author: Tadanobu Asano

49. "Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
Author: Theodore Roosevelt

50. "Significant steps have been taken since 9-11 to protect out country here at home, but much remains to be done, Americans from across the political spectrum must come together to develop the next phase of our efforts to counter global terror."
Author: Warren Rudman

Effort Quotes Pictures