Selected effort quotes

1. I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

2. Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

3. God helps only those who are prepared and determined to help themselves.

4. Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

5. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

6. There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

7. Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

8. A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

9. A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.

10. However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.

11. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

12. There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

13. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

14. It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.

15. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

16. It's like you wanting to marry Miss World and she doesn't want you, what can I do about it? I can try to help you, but if she does not want to marry you what can I do?

17. Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been, things remain.

18. My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out.

19. If I do enough different things in enough different ways, I may, eventually, do something right.

20. Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps, doth die; And this security, It is the common moth, That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.

21. Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

22. Give up thinking as though not giving it up. Observe techniques as though not observing.

23. If you want to do your duty properly, you should do just a little more than that.

24. You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

25. Effort supposes resistance.

26. I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

27. You have to make it happen.

28. The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

29. Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

30. A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

31. Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.

32. Thy purpose firm is equal to the deed: Who does the best his circumstance allows Does well, acts nobly; angels could no more.

33. No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day.

34. It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

35. This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter.

36. In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

37. While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.

38. My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?

39. Have you ever tried to split sawdust?

40. All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

41. Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.

42. Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben der taglich sie erobern muss.

43. Wer immer strebend sich bemuht, Den konnen wir erlosen.

44. It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.

45. How deepe do we dig, and for how coarse gold?

46. Whence thy learning? Hath thy toil O'er books consumed the midnight oil?

47. We're here to talk about education. But I want to say something before that....You know, education, if you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

48. To busy oneself with what is futile when one can do something useful, to attend to what is simple when one has the mettle to attempt what is difficult, is to strip talent of its dignity. It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing.

49. You must shatter the vase to spread its perfume, and smite the rock to get the spark.

50. Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet.

51. He could hit a whole bucket of balls from there and not get one closer than that.

52. But the fruit that can fall without shaking Indeed is too mellow for me.

53. Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.

54. Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

55. Only those who attempt the absurd... will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.

56. One and one is two; two and two is four; and 'five will get you ten' if you work it right!

57. The easy, gentle, and sloping path...is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

58. El modo de dar una vez en el clavo es dar cien veces en la herradura.

59. Ces terribles chevaux gris! Comme ils travaillent!

60. Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

61. Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.

62. Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

63. Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

64. Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper.

65. Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

66. It is not decided by votes what is true; otherwise we could never come to any truth, ever. People will vote for what is comfortable - and lies are very comfortable because you don't have to do anything about them, you just have to believe. Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and it needs you to walk alone on a path that nobody has traveled before.

67. 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. You are going upstream - that's what misery is.

68. Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search. And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose - out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air - it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.

69. The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered experession of his nature and our destinies.

70. We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because congnition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.

71. Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure he is he shall shoot higher than who aims but at a bush.

72. Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.

73. Fortunam citius reperias quam retineas.

74. Do not turn back when you are just at the goal.

75. Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.

76. I hit hard for the glory of God.

77. It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

78. Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?

79. Inscribe all human effort with one word, Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!

80. By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

81. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

82. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: - surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.

83. It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.

84. You are a vain fellow. You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things. A hero! ... I don't quite know what that is: but, you see, I imagine that a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.

85. Enough work to do, and strength enough to do the work.

86. To 'catch' a husband is an art; to 'hold' him is a job.

87. It takes a son of a bitch to change a habit.

88. It wasn't as bad, Garraty discovered, if you stared down at your feet as you walked and leaned forward a little. You stared strictly down at the tiny patch of pavement between your feet and it gave you the impression that you were walking on level ground. Of course, you couldn't kid yourself that your lungs and the breath in your throat weren't heating up, because they were.

89. Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

90. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

91. Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

92. The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.

93. To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

94. It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.

95. I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.

96. Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

97. Proper preparation prevents poor performance

98. ...if I shall have sufficient strength to improve and amplify what was written and published by me up to now about motion by adding some little speculations, and in particular those relating to the force of percussion, in the investigation of which I have consumed hundreds and thousands of hours, and finally reduced this to very easy explanation, so that people can understand it in less than half an hour of time.

99. Train hard, fight easy.

100. It's hard work