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

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

Learning is the first step in making positive changes within yourself. Other factors are conviction, determination, action & effort. Learning & education help develop conviction about the need to change & increase your commitment. Conviction then develops into determination. Next, strong determination leads to action: a sustained effort to implement the changes. This final factor of effort is critical.

You have to make an effort to be in an unprotected environment because everyone thinks you're a completely incapable idiot who couldn't possibly brush his teeth without an assistant. You have to make an effort in order to be able to actually experience the country that you're in.

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.

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not an effort of once a week or once a day. It is an effort of once and for all.

The power of now can only be realized now. It requires no time and effort. Effort means you're trying hard to get somewhere, and so you are not present, welcoming this moment as it is.

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.

The worst is that the very hardest thinking will not bring thoughts. They must come like good children of God and cry, "Here we are." You expend effort and energy thinking hard. Then, after you have given up, they come sauntering in with their hands in their pockets. If the effort had not been made to open the door, however, who knows when they could have come.

In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.

Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.

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.

In fact, I believe the first companies that make an effort to develop an authentic, transparent, and meaningful social contract with their fans and customers will turn out to be the ones that are the most successful in the future. While brands that refuse to make the effort will lose stature and customer loyalty.

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

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence - they look paradoxical - unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.

The effort of learning. It's the same when you approach any new skill or technique, from a dance step to driving a car. The effort of learning stops you, at first, from doing it well.

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.

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort -- a sustained effort -- to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Effort without talent is a depressing situation... but talent without effort is a tragedy.

If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

Parties do not maintain themselves. They are maintained by effort. The government is not self-existent. It is maintained by the effort of those who believe in it. The people of America believe in American institutions, the American form of government and the American method of transacting business.

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

It may also be pertinent to ask whether a greater effort in the less expensive basic stages of research may not lead to reductions of effort in the far costlier stages of development and prototype construction.

Very few American parents give a crap about how they raise their kids. They put minimal effort into it. Who told you it's a good idea to buy a developing mind a video game?

All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of 'making an effort'. I hate this idea today as much as I did as a child. I don't know why I hate it so much; I just do.

Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort.

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

Effort, not ability, makes the biggest difference in achievement.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Effort plus motive equals result.

What was it called, that symbol of the serpent eating its own tail? It probably signified infinity, endlessness, timelessness. But for me it would mean the effort to love well going on and on, round and round, always imperfect and always forgivable. The best we could ever do for each other.

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.

The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.

When you are knitting socks and sweaters and scarves, you aren't just knitting. You are assigning a value to human effort. You are holding back time. You are preserving the simple unchanging act of handwork.

We've got a support system that gives our players a wonderful opportunity to graduate. If they go to class and give good effort, they can graduate from this school, and I believe that's important when you go out recruiting.

Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it.

Some people who make music are instantly very savvy about how they can get their music to communicate in a larger way. For me, the music was always first, and I put a lot of time and effort and thought into making the recordings. But everything else around it, all the things that were necessary to have a career in pop music, I was completely ill equipped to handle.

When I hear traditional family values raised, I hear that effort once again to re-establish the man as head and master of his family. Who had the, not only the right, but the obligation to discipline his wife and children to keep them in line?

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

It's not that we fear the place of darkness, but that we don't think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.

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.

We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.

It's curious that throughout our history together, with no apparent effort, people have been able to think of the cat simultaneously as the guardian spirit of the hearth and home, and as the emblem of freedom, independence, and rootlessness.

The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients. We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully. Most of our ideas don't eat dust but glimpse the light of day because we find it much more helpful to spend some serious time and effort before we start working on a project, rather than suffer through it afterwards.

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.