Quotes About Effort

The first thing to be understood: effort is needed, but effort alone is not enough - effort and then effortlessness, effort plus effortlessness. Effort precedes, and then effortlessness follows. Effortlessness is the peak of effort, it comes only when you have reached the peak

Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.

If life is a gift then all that belongs to life is going to be a gift. Happiness, love, meditation - all that is beautiful is going to be a gift from the holy, from the whole. You cannot deserve it in any way and you cannot force existence to make you happy, or to make you loving, or to make you meditative. That very effort is of the ego. That very effort creates misery. That very effort goes against you. That very effort has destroyed you - it is suicidal.

She had taken him for granted, she thought with surprise and shame, watching the flickering candlelight. She had assumed his kindness was so natural and so innate, she had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each of them from the other. Any effort to accept the loss of his family with equanimity. Any effort to remain cheerful and calm in the face of his own dying.

Courage is required to make an initial thrust toward one's coveted goal, but even greater courage is called for when one stumbles and must make a second effort to achieve. Have the determination to make the effort, the single-mindedne ss to work toward a worthy goal, and the courage not only to face the challenges that inevitably come but also to make a second effort, should such be required.

Our effort was a serious effort, genuine effort, to open the door for peace, unfortunately, the Security Council is not ready to listen to that message.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will write for one, because you have to give the listener something and he has to make an effort in order to understand certain things.

I would say except when I have been attacked the black community has seldom seen fit to even mention the gay aspect. And since when I have been attacked I have usually been defended by the black community, I would say that the black newspapers have played it very straight. If I was attacked they simply published that I was attacked, if I was defended they simply said I had been defended. But I don't think they have taken any effort at maligning me or maligning gays or making any effort to give to people anything that wasn't news.

When workers can get and equal return for less effort, workers make less effort

I explain the law of compensation like this: ‘Returns are minimal in spite of massive effort at the start, yet returns can be massive with minimal effort over time’.

Whether we meditate individually or collectively, there is one thing we absolutely must do: we have to meditate consciously. Making an unconscious effort is like forcing oneself to play football in spite of one's utmost unwillingness. One plays, but gets no joy. Conscious effort is like playing football most willingly. One gets real joy. Similarly, conscious meditation gives us inner Delight from the soul.

Half-baked effort is almost as good as no effort put in at all. Always seek to do your best. Good things always have a way of finding those who put forth their best even when their situation seems bleak.

The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

No effort is ever wasted, although some pay dividends later than you think. Do not imagine that you "wasted your time" because something didn't turn out right. There is no such thing as "waste" in the Universe. Everything - everything - yields benefit. It's true. And your life will show you this. So don't decry the "effort that failed." All things lead to your highest good. You just may not know it yet.

You can't expect to make no effort. You still have to make the effort and be kind and understanding.

This is a global effort we're going to have to lead to overcome this jihadist effort. It's more than Osama bin Laden. But he is going to pay, and he will die.

While this debate today is a belated effort to inform the American people, it is nevertheless an empty gesture. It is time to admit our mistake in Iraq and begin to bring our troops home with honor.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

I think this is a very good look at how to tackle this effort. The resources and the talent are here, but now we've got to move forward with some sort of direction.

Persistence, persistence, and persistence. The Power can be created and maintained through daily practice - continuous effort.

There is no investment you can make which will pay you so well as the effort to scatter sunshine and good cheer through your establishment.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

There's a heroic amount of effort that goes into making him [Doctor Strange] a superhero by the end of the film.

The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

It takes a long, hard effort and sustained determination to reduce crime. We will stay the course and we are confident that the numbers will continue to go down.

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of energy. I never paid such a price.

No matter what the issue is, don't try to justify why you don't feel good. And don't try to justify why you should feel differently. Don't try to blame whatever it is you think the reason is that's keeping you from feeling good. All of that is wasted effort. Just try to feel better right now.

I think the draw quotient has always been high in world championship matches because the amount of effort people put into neutralizing each other's openings. It's just now with computers that it has reached a new level.

We've put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

Like any other living, growing thing, love requires effort to keep it healthy.

My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

The smallest effort to remember the Divine, or even one of its timeless truths, connects you to a calmness whose power is in that secret strength found in all things deep.

I wish that the Democrats would put some effort into Social Security reform, illegal immigration's reform, tax reform, or some of the other real issues that are out there.

But on balance, a performer wants to feel that there's something there which stands out because you put a lot of effort into it, a lot of energy and a lot of yourself into something. I feel pretty successful about some movies I've been in that have not been greeted with a lot of enthusiasm and I do trust my own criteria.

Making better choices takes work. There is a daily give and take, but it is worth the effort.

When you ask the Universe to bless you in your effort to align yourself with your soul, you open a passageway between yourself and your guides and Teachers. That is what a blessing is: the opening of a passageway between you and nonphysical guidance.

In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr

There is nothing so simple as being the Self. It requires no effort, no aid. One has to leave off the wrong identity and be in his (her) eternal, natural, inherent state.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.