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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"Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant."
"Every great success is an accumulation of thousands of ordinary efforts that no one else sees or appreciates."
"Take a Nicodemus and put a Joseph Smith's spirit in him, and what do you have? Take a Da Vinci or a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare and give him a total knowledge of the plan of salvation of God and personal revelation and cleanse him and take a look at the statues he will carve and the murals he will paint and the masterpieves he will produce. Take a handel with his purposeful effort, his superb talent, his earnest desire to properly depict the story, and give him inward vision of the whole true story and revelation, and what a master you will have!"
"There really is "no effort without error and shortcoming" and there really is no triumph without vulnerability."
"Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them."
"But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering."
"The trite objects of human efforts-possessions, superficial success, luxury-have always seemed contemptible to me."
"The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working. One is tempted to stop and listen to it. The only thing is to turn away and go on working. Work. There is nothing else."
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort"
"Love . . . includes fellowship in suffering, in joy and in effort."
"he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular"
"The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort."
"Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought."
"Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it."
"I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts."
"I like to go back to Chinese film-making from time to time. I don't think I can make Chinese films back to back; it's such a big effort. I'd have to take a very long break."
"James Comey had nine interactions with Bob Mueller after the Donald Trump's election. And in none of those, Comey testified, did he express any interest, concern, about what the Russians did, how they did it, how do we prevent it. He continuously has in fact denigrated the whole idea and dismissed that it was the Russians, and apparently hasn't yet accepted the 100-percent consensus of everybody that knows about this that this was a conscious and deliberate effort on their part to attack our democracy."
"That's because of everything the public interest and the media interest is focused on: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? Whether there was cooperation with the Russians. I don't mean to say that's a distraction or we shouldn't follow it up. But the underlying story of the Russians trying to subvert our democracy, both through propaganda, planted stories, manipulation of social media and through direct efforts to infiltrate our state election system, is really an enormously significant event. And it's not over."
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy."
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so."
