"As labor is the common burden of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden onto the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race."
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Effort quotes
Effort
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Effort quotes (page 37 of 179)
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"Complexity means distracted effort. Simplicity means focused effort."
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"Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan."
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"If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?"
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"I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them."
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"practically nothing we do ever stands by itself. If it is good, it will serve some good purpose in the future. If it is evil, it may haunt us and handicap our efforts in unimagined ways."
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"Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then 'Ole!' And if not, do your dance anyhow. And 'Ole!' to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. 'Ole!' to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up."
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"When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once."
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"When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion."
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"Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move."
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"I work very hard to achieve simplicity, which is never natural, never spontaneous. It's always obtained at the price of a great effort."
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"In an effort to look cool, I am going to stop shouting Hey, you! at airplanes."
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"Plateau experiencing can be achieved, learned, earned by long hard work.... A transient glimpse is certainly possible in the peak experiences which may, after all, come sometimes to anyone. But, so to speak, to take up residence on the high plateau .... that is another matter altogether. That tends to be a lifelong effort."
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"When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo"
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"I would like people to recognize in looking at my story that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It's not the environment, it's not the other people who were there trying to help you or trying to stop you. It's what you decide to do and how much effort you put behind it."
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"Rather than reacting to every risk we hear and see, we should make an effort to discern which ones we can do something about."
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"In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds."
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"If I put forth a legitimate effort, then I feel like, if that doesn't work out, that's all I can do."
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"Life is not easy. But that's not the only truth that matters in this context. It also happens to be true that it takes just as much effort to have a "bad life," in which you don't get what you want, as it does to have a "good life," where you do. So given the choice, why not go for the good life?"
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"Give your best effort, because you are worth your best effort."
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