Effort Quotes

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. (Samuel Johnson)
Theology --An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing. View quote
H. L. Mencken
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality. View quote
Erich Fromm
The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting in above-average effort. View quote
Colin Powell
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. View quote
Steven Weinberg
A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. View quote
George Eliot
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. View quote
George Santayana
Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity. View quote
William Howard Taft
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythms, by effort that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language. (Henri Matisse)
The greater the effort, the greater the glory. View quote
Pierre Corneille
Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. View quote
Franklin D. Roosevelt
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. View quote
George Eliot
There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. View quote
Norman Borlaug
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. View quote
John Ruskin
Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal. View quote
Donald Rumsfeld
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. View quote
Chuck Palahniuk
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. View quote
James Baldwin
The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself. View quote
Howard H. Aiken
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. (D. H. Lawrence)
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle. View quote
William Osler
Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle. View quote
Helen Keller
Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. View quote
Erich Fromm