Effort quotes
3.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside effort — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen."
"You just have to start putting one foot in front of the other, making an effort to get healthy every day."
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head."
"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule."
"Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete."
"Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort."
"Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel."
"The world's not going to wait for you. If you have an idea, put some effort behind it and get it out there."
"The camera movement should be like a cat jumping onto a table - with just enough amount of effort and that's it. That's enough."
"Brand-image campaigns establish contact with the subconscious of the consumer below the word level. They do this with visual symbols instead of words, Mr. Martineau says, because the visual symbols are far more significant. They communicate faster. They are more direct. There is no work, no mental effort. Their sole purpose is to create images and moods."
"Effort is between you and you."
"If you have enough push, you don't have to worry about the pull."
"Most failures could have been converted into successes if someone had held on another minute or made more effort."
"We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination."
"The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances."
"Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while."
"I'm content with the fact that I made a decent effort. That's what I've always worried about: that I wouldn't try hard enough."
"A contemplative should pay equal attention to concentration, energetic effort and equanimity, and not exclusively to one of these factors only."
"Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes."
"If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real."
