Top 100 The Effort Quotes
#1. Some people just don't want to put in the effort. I just show up and say some lines and I'm famous. Anyone living below the poverty line just needs to shape up or be shipped out, you know?
Zach Braff
#2. Life is about balance, and we all have to make the effort in areas that we can to enable us to make a difference.
Orlando Bloom
#3. To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.
Confucius
#4. Happiness can be defined as the function of the effort we put forth toward the realization of life's goals. When we understand that our purpose in this world is to strive toward purposeful accomplishment, precisely then will we experience happiness.
H.W. Charles
#5. I think that the effort to continue to look for some law to somehow make violence go away is missing the point.
Mitt Romney
#6. 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.
Alan Watts
#7. Do not let your good ideas to spend your brain energy, do it with all the effort because the shadow of the success can become a reality only with hard work.
Isra
#8. Put up the dream. Put in the knowledge. Put out the effort.
Denis Waitley
#9. A lot of people have the ability, but they don't put forth the effort.
Joe Carter
#10. And just then the thin boy yawned. I had labelled him as an ineffectual sort of lad but he certainly could yawn; it was a stretching, groaning, voluptuous paroxysm which drowned my words and it went on and on till he finally lay back, bleary and exhausted by the effort.
James Herriot
#11. It's relatively easy to generate a lot of enthusiasm for Puget Sound in the short term. Sustaining the effort to clean it up is somewhat tougher.
William Ruckelshaus
#12. I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence. I have always believed that human civilization is the fruit of the effort of both women and men.
Tawakkol Karman
#13. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory.
Steve Toltz
#14. The world is tired of seeing the perpetuation of violence and terrorism, but the effort to create a real peace needs to go hand in hand with the struggle to restore justice,
Mohammad Khatami
#15. I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.
Calvin Coolidge
#16. Often, when you've reached a very high level of achievement, you almost become paralyzed by the idea that anything you might do might be imperfect. Perfection is just the striving, the effort, the struggle, but it's hard to remember that.
Gelsey Kirkland
#17. I've always had such wonderful opportunities, but I never made the effort, haven't put on the pressure. But I never took them.
Diana Vreeland
#18. The finest flowers are those transplanted, for transplanting means difficulty, a readjusting to new conditions, and through the effort put forth to find adjustment does the plant progress.
Elbert Hubbard
#19. But it's so hard, Papa...
Those things that are most beneficial to us generally are. But they are also worth the effort.
Kim Vogel Sawyer
#20. When you set down the path to create art, whatever sort of art it is, understand that the path is neither short not easy. That means you must determine if the route is worth the effort. If it's not, dream bigger.
Seth Godin
#21. Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.
Max McKeown
#22. Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
Steve Erickson
#23. The effort of every time I put out a video, it was like, 'Okay, I've got to put it on my Facebook, I've got to put it on my website, what's the view count now? What's the view count now? What's the view count now?' You get obsessive with it.
Rachel Bloom
#24. We ask for happiness but what we get is unhappiness. We all put our efforts into trying to be happy but we make a fundamental mistake: happiness is not related to the effort, happiness is related to not asking for it ...
Rajneesh
#26. Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.
Elbert Hubbard
#27. I'm reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it's an effort, and is it worth the effort? I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It's become my habit. I just carry on.
Lee Kuan Yew
#28. I would suggest that developing in every student the positive potential that can benefit the world has to be the primary purpose of education, rather than the effort to impart knowledge and skills.
Ilchi Lee
#29. I can physically see the effort it takes for him to open his mouth and force out the words. He's spent so much of his life not being seen, not being heard, that he's forgotten how to realize anything he says does hold weight and is important.
Kelley York
#30. The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
Anne Carson
#31. When you eat pure food that isn't genetically modified, your physical and mental state does improve and it's worth the effort to make that happen.
Laura Prepon
#32. It is said that the compensation for the effort courage, tenacity, and endurance displayed during the journey was not happiness. Nor glory. What God offered as a reward was only rest.
Ingrid Betancourt
#33. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
Walter Lippmann
#34. It's not so bad to find yourself free of the effort to overcome your life. It's not so bad.
Karen Maezen Miller
#35. CNN, a part of the Time Warner company, lives for news about everything and anyone. In the office, the bosses openly discuss the need for a diverse staff and diverse stories, and each time we draw new viewers, the effort intensifies.
Soledad O'Brien
#36. Not only has President Bush broken his word on funding, he has not put in the effort required to turn this excellent idea into a lifesaving reality.
Jamie Drummond
#37. A disagreement or incident involving someone who's not that important to you, like a guy who cut you off in traffic or a rude cashier, is something that should roll off your shoulders. Save the effort for resolving conflicts with the people you cherish.
Joel Osteen
#38. Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#39. Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.
Iain Sinclair
#40. I'm glad we will not be forced to live by your quill, because I am rather used to having food on the table. But, I appreciate the effort behind those words.
Cynthia Hand
#41. Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.
Carson McCullers
#42. Do NOT say you "can't"! You can say, "I don't want to". You can say, "I'm not willing to put forth the effort". But DO NOT say you CAN'T!
Tony Horton
#43. 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.
Calvin Coolidge
#44. Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#45. 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.
Max Lerner
#46. Nothing good comes in life or athletics unless a lot of hard work has preceded the effort. Only temporary success is achieved by taking short cuts.
Roger Staubach
#47. I think one of the geniuses of Bound and The Matrix and Memento is the complete collaboration of the effort. There were no rotten apples.
Joe Pantoliano
#48. The essence of living is discovering. Indeed, it is the joy of discovery that makes life worth the effort.
Vijay Krishna
#49. In order to recognize small changes in effort, the effort itself must first be reduced. More delicate and improved control of movement is possible only through the increase of sensitivity, through a greater ability to sense differences.
Moshe Feldenkrais
#50. Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
Michael Specter
#51. It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.
Charlie Pierce
#52. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
Simone Weil
#53. Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.
Zaha Hadid
#54. If politics mean ... the effort to secure through legislative action better conditions of life for the people, greater opportunities for our children and other people's children ... then it most assuredly is a woman's job as much as it is a man's job.
Irene Parlby
#55. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#56. It seemed impossible that men with hearts and brains were capable of it. Such devastation of cities, so many innocent lives lost. It seemed to him that if just a small part of the effort put into war could be put into peace, they'd be so much better off
Elizabeth Berg
#57. It's challenging as an actor to let go but I had some pleasure out of it too. To not have the effort of having to present myself is quite liberating.
Juliette Binoche
#58. Commandments and covenants of God are like navigational instructions from celestial heights and will lead us safely to our eternal destination. It is one of beauty and glory beyond understanding. It is worth the effort. It is worth making decisive corrections now and then staying on course.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#59. We need to take nostalgia seriously as an energizing impulse, maybe even a form of knowledge. The effort to revalue what has been lost can motivate serious historical inquiry; it can also cast a powerful light on the present.
T. J. Jackson Lears
#60. I applaud the effort it takes to put a record together.
John Lydon
#61. To have world peace, we all have to have a healthy understanding of what is necessary to bring World Peace. It's not something that will be dropped on our laps. We have to work for it. Until we get World Peace, I think my strongest passion stays in the effort to get it.
Yoko Ono
#62. Romance isn't always about big gestures though,' Harry said. 'Sometimes it's the words the man finds or the effort that he has gone to. It doesn't have to be something expensive.
Holly Martin
#63. Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
Anais Nin
#64. Seeing energy as it flows is an imperious need on the path of knowledge. Ultimately, all the effort of sorcerers is guided to that end. It is not enough for a warrior to know that the universe is energy; he has to verify it for himself.
Carlos Castaneda
#65. She tries to not ask, to stop asking, but the effort is like trying to un-pop a balloon.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. Success isn't something you chase. It's something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it'll come when you least expect it. Most people don't understand that.
Michael Jordan
#67. Bowing helps to eliminate our self-centered ideas. This is not so easy. It is difficult to get rid of these ideas, and bowing is a very valuable practice. The result is not the point; it is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable. There is no end to this practice.
Shunryu Suzuki
#68. I went over before the British Open and played Valderrama thinking that I might make the team, might be a captain's pick. I made the effort to go over there.
Payne Stewart
#69. Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.
R. Scott Bakker
#70. I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#71. Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
Walter Lippmann
#72. Meditation is not your doing. You simply make the effort, but it is not your doing. Your effort is needed to prepare the ground. As the ground is ready, immediately you see you are no more; the whole cosmos is. You have entered a greater womb, an eternal womb of tremendous peace and ecstasy.
Rajneesh
#73. You have to make the effort with children. You can't have them thinking that I reckon I'm special, otherwise they'll start thinking they're special. I want them to feel normal for as long as possible because God knows they'll reach an age when they'll be told they're not.
Noel Gallagher
#74. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
T. S. Eliot
#75. Select a subject that interests you and make an effort to become an expert in that field. I promise you, if you make the effort, and you become an expert, you will have a wonderful career.
Dan Shechtman
#76. I don't chase after things, but I put forward the effort and know the rest of it is out of my hands.
Michael Ian Black
#77. ...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
Azar Nafisi
#78. Given Mr. Obama's lack of experience as an executive, and his past performance in crises such as the oil spill, it is reasonable for those of us who support the effort in Afghanistan to worry that he will not be up to the job.
Jim Talent
#79. Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.
Craig Venter
#80. Some people are capable of making great sacrifices, but few are capable of concealing how much the effort has cost them; and it is this concealment that constitutes their value.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#81. I was the legal counsel in the effort to amend the Virginia Constitution to give Virginians the right to hunt and fish constitutionally, and we are one of the few states in the country to protect that right.
Tim Kaine
#82. In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Ray Bradbury
#83. Success requires both urgency and patience. Be urgent about making the effort, and patient about seeing the results.
Ralph Marston
#84. Bread takes the effort of kneading but also requires sitting quietly while the dough rises with a power all its own.
David Richo
#85. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
#86. Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards the truth.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#87. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism - . the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure - were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved;
Will Durant
#88. One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.
Rex Stout
#89. In the practice of Yoga one can emphasize the body, the mind or the self and hence the effort can never be fruitless.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya
#90. I regret not getting brutally forthright with human beings a hell of a lot sooner than I did. Civility and obliquity are wasted on people who will not make the effort to be harsher or stricter on their own gooey egos than they are on other people.
Kenny Smith
#91. The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.
Francois Mauriac
#92. The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#93. We all have anger in our hearts at times from past situations or even present. These thoughts hurt one's self more than anything. Without the effort of washing those thoughts from our minds there can be no inner peace.
Ron Baratono
#94. As I watch my priest lay the communion table for the gathered believers, I remember why eating attentively is worth all the effort: The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.
Lauren F. Winner
#95. The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
George Santayana
#96. The elf's eyes found him, and his lips trembled with the effort to form words.
'Harry... Potter...'
And then with a little shudder the elf became quite still, and his eyes were nothing more than great, glassy orbs sprinkled with light from the stars they could not see.
J.K. Rowling
#97. You can't cure trauma when violence is ongoing, so the primary effort must be working for peace. You can't negotiate a lasting peace without bringing women into the effort, but women can't become peacemakers without releasing the pain that keeps them from feeling their own strength.
Leymah Gbowee
#98. Making better choices takes work. There is a daily give and take, but it is worth the effort.
Tom Rath
#99. It's not enough to dream. It's not enough to try. It's not enough to set goals or climb ladders. It's not enough to value. The effort has to be based on practical realities that produce the result. Only then can we dream, set goals, and work to achieve them with confidence.
Stephen R. Covey
#100. It was a momentary laughter, in which our souls united. But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
Andre Gide
