Quotes About Effort

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.

All good things require effort. That which is worth having will cost part of your physical being, your intellectual power, and your soul power—‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ (Matt. 7:7.) But you have to seek, you have to knock. On the other hand, sin thrusts itself upon you. It walks beside you, it tempts you, it entices, it allures. You do not have to put forth effort. … Evil seeks you, and it requires effort and fortitude to combat it. But truth and wisdom are gained only by seeking, by prayer, and by effort.

We measure areas of performance that are often ignored: jumping in pursuit of every rebound even if you don't get it, swatting at every pass, diving for loose balls, letting someone smash into you in order to draw the foul. These 'effort' statistics are also stored on computer. Effort is what ultimately separates journeyman players from impact players. Knowing how well a player executes all these little things is the key to unlocking career-best performances.

We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality.

It is not expensive to be beautiful. It takes only a little effort to be presentable and beautiful. But it takes some effort. And unfortunately people think of beauty as luxury, beauty as frivolity, ... or extravagance. Beauty is a discipline, beauty is art, is harmony, in the ideological sense and in the theological sense, beauty is God and love made real. And the ultimate reach in this world is beauty.

Change takes effort. And the reality is, most people don't want to put in effort to better their life.

Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is real hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against the nature.

That is the hope that inspires Christians. We know that every effort to better society, especially when injustice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.

To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort.

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

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 key to success is effort. The bigger the goal, the greater the effort.

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.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is to known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money - and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

Whatever forms of meditation you practice, the most important point is to apply mindfulness continuously, and make a sustained effort. It is unrealistic to expect results from meditation within a short period of time. What is required is continuous sustained effort.

But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.

If we want to cook food we need to leave the stove on continuously and not keep turning it on and off. If the heat is continuous, no matter whether it is high or low our food will eventually be cooked. Similarly, if we continuously apply effort, even if it is only a small effort, it is certain that we shall eventually experience the fruits of our practice.

The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.

A lot of people have said my movies are all the same. But I don't actually make an effort to have a style. I'm usually just thinking of what can we do to make it funnier or more interesting or just kind of refine it and it ends up like that.

If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra.

You can use the same motto for everything in life. If you put that effort in, you'll get what you want.

I believe that the very effort to convert anybody is violence, it is interfering in his individuality, in his uniqueness, into his freedom.

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

Every effort to make society sensitive to the importance of the family, is a great service to humanity.

I've worked on jobs where there are almost 200 people on set... you always make an effort to have a relationship but you can't really when there's 200.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

You might be a redneck if in an effort to watch your cholesterol, you eat Spam Lite.

I have a friend who's collecting unemployment insurance. This guy has never worked so hard in his life as he has to keep this thing going. He's down there every week, waiting on the lines and getting interviewed and making up all these lies about looking for jobs. If they had any idea of the effort and energy that he is expending to avoid work, I'm sure they'd give him a raise.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

It's easy to be pessimistic. Nobody needs to be taught how. You don't need to buy a book on it. You don't need to go to classes to learn how to be pessimistic. But you do read books on how to think positively, and people who write them become very rich because it takes effort.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

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.

Ultimately, each transnational firm strives for its own advantage, and is supported in that effort by the state power wherein it resides, or at least where its main shareholders are domiciled.

It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.

No fate holds more splendour for an artist, than the one which greets his effort with such enthousiasm!

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.

It's clear to me now that we've got to reach out to the Arab Sunni community in particular in an effort to cause some moderate political activity to take place so they join the future of Iraq.

Well, we've got a major effort under way to try to educate everybody, to let them know we have a zero tolerance policy where sexual assault is involved.

Hey, look — Harry’s got a Weasley sweater, too!” Fred and George were wearing blue sweaters, one with a large yellow F on it, the other a G. “Harry’s is better than ours, though,” said Fred, holding up Harry’s sweater. “She obviously makes more of an effort if you’re not family.

Protestants are the more segmented group. Mainline churches - you have problems in the U.S., Europe, the Scottish Church, the Dutch Protestant Church, the state church in Norway. The evangelicals have been pro Israel, but a major effort is to bring them in on the Palestinian side. A huge problem and the problems are rising.

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.

These small shows were decidedly a success. The exhibitions were not too large to be seen easily. It was not an effort, as larger collections of pictures usually are.

No one will deny that the excessive use of alcohol and alcoholic beverages would do more than any other single factor to make impossible a total war effort.

You don't need to have extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.