Effort Quotes - page 89
In order to write well, I need to have the ability to be honest with myself without it causing pain. When I'm really sad, honesty hurts, and I find myself not going to interesting places in my work. I guess you can be sad and strong at the same time. Writing requires strength, discipline, and a tolerance for loneliness. The longer I have a partner, the more loneliness I want, because I've lost it. But loneliness is also excruciating unless I'm writing. Yet you can only write so many hours in a day, and it takes a lot of effort to fill the void of not writing.
Ottessa Moshfegh
I hoped that it would please God to enable the friends of Christianity to be the instruments of wiping away what I have long thought, next to the slave trade, the foulest blot on the moral character of our countrymen, the suffering of our fellow-subjects - nay, they even stand towards us in the closer relation of our tenants - in the East Indies to remain, without any effort on our part to enlighten and reform them, under the grossest, the darkest, and most depraving system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed on earth.
William Wilberforce
As the queen raged at him, he responded, first calmly, then with his own heat. "Is there no one that you will see punished?" the queen shouted. "Are you fond of Teleus now that you preserve his life at all costs?"
"I only asked you to reconsider."
"There is nothing to reconsider!"
"You know why I need him."
"Not anymore," the queen declared with finality.
The king ignored the finality. "Now more than ever," he insisted.
"He has failed-"
"That was not entirely his fault!"
"Then you will unmake my decisions?" Attolia dared him to try.
"You said that I could," Eugenides flatly replied.
Pushed too far, the queen lashed out. The king made no effort to avoid the blow. His head snapped around and his forehead struck the doorjamb. He staggered and caught himself. By the time he opened his eyes, she was at the door and then she was gone.
Megan Whalen Turner
A favourable climate for peaceful negotiation must be created and can only be created by painstaking, unremitting effort. Conflicting parties must be led to realize that the road to peace can never be traversed by threatening to fight at every bend, by merely being armed to the teeth, or by flushing every bush to find an enemy. An essential first step in a civilized approach to peace in these times would call for a moratorium on recrimination and reproach.
Ralph Bunche
We are not simple people who believe in happiness; nor weaklings who crumple to the ground in distress at the first reverse; nor skeptics observing the bloody effort of marching humanity from the lofty heights of a mocking, sterile wit. Believing in the fight, though we entertain no illusions about it, we are armed against every disappointment.
Nikos Kazantzakis
I know you are brave and unselfish people, making sacrifices for a great principle but I cannot join you. I believe in the present effort which the allies are making to suppress German militarism. I would approve of America going to their assistance. I would enlist to that end, if ever there be a situation where I believe I could do more with my hands than I could with my pen.
Upton Sinclair
I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.
Anaïs Nin
... but I am under no apprehension of a capital injury from any other source than that of the continual depreciation of our Money.
This indeed is truly alarming, and of so serious a nature that every other effort is in vain unless something can be done to restore its credit.
..
Where this has been the policy (in Connecticut for instance) the prices of every article have fallen and the money consequently is in demand; but in the other States you can scarce get a single thing for it, and yet it is with-held from the public by speculators, while every thing that can be useful to the public is engrossed by this tribe of black gentry, who work more effectually against us that the enemys Arms; and are a hundd. times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in.
George Washington
The first thing I did when I picked up any instrument, when I was five years old, was write a song. It's kind of funny; I thought about it, statements that it's a "solo effort" - it's kind of like, "Oh, well I've been doing this since I was five." I was kind of doing this before I did anything else.
St. Vincent (musician)
In 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, I was the Delta Force commander during the events most commonly referred to as "Black Hawk Down." Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in the city of five million people, where most of those people were starving refugees. Within thirty minutes of the first chopper being shot down, the second one was shot down. When the first chopper went down I sent every one of my soldiers who were already fighting in the city to go rescue the crew and passengers of the first crash. I was left with few options when the second helo went down over a mile away from the first crash. I had to pull together a second rescue effort using those soldiers, sailors, and airmen who were left in the base- many of whom were not combat arms specialties (they were clerks, mechanics, communicators, and supply people). To their credit, every man was eager to be part of the effort to rescue their brothers at the second crash site.
William G. Boykin
The Internet has created a seismic disruption to the balance of power in the media. It is getting easier and easier to post your thoughts, photos, or videos. Yet the Wild West of the Web is being tamed. Small Internet service providers are being driven out of business, with corporations like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T dominating the market. Privacy, security, and the freedom to publish without fear of censorship are dwindling with each merger, with each effort by corporate lobbyists to further restrict the open Internet in favor of a narrow profit advantage.
Amy Goodman
It is in the aligning of the three vehicles, the physical, the emotional, and the lower mind body, within the causal periphery, and their stabilising there by an effort of the will, that the real work of the Ego or Higher Self in any particular incarnation can be accomplished. The great thinkers of the race, the true exponents of lower mind, are fundamentally those whose three lower bodies are aligned; that is to say those whose mental body holds the other two in circumspect alignment. The mental body, then, is in direct communication, unobstructed and free from interference, straight through to the physical brain.
Alice Bailey
For the average man, then, this alignment occurs only at intervals, in moments of stress, in hours of needed humanitarian effort and in times of intensest aspiration. Abstraction of a more or less degree has to enter in before the Ego takes continued notice of the personality or lower self. When that abstraction involves the emotions, is based in the mentality and contacts the physical brain, then alignment is commencing.
Alice Bailey
These words sound simple, but the "Forces of Light" is the name for certain new Powers which are being invoked by the Hierarchy at this time, Whose potencies can be brought into great activity at the May full moon if due effort is made. The Spirit of Peace which is invoked is an inter-planetary Agent of great power Whose cooperation has been promised if all aspirants and disciples can cooperate to break through the shell of separation and hatred which holds our planet in thrall.
Alice Bailey
The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America. Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.
Margaret Sanger
And who could tell if we were to be forced into the conflict? No one at the time could predict. We were to suffer long years of uncertainty during the World War while Spain slowly but proudly recovered from her deep wounds, unaided and isolated. Our not being drawn into war (which would have completed Spain's ruin), was, as everyone knows now, entirely due to General Franco's inflexible firmness of purpose. Not even Hitler, at the height of his power, was able to sway him to his side or alter his determination to keep Spain out of it- a remarkable feat. From the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War to this day, much has happened and much good has come to this country. Her astounding and heroic effort has not gone unrewarded, as fifteen million tourists (in 1964) can testify.
Francisco Franco
One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well.
Hippolyte Taine
We cannot leave our topic without saying at least a word about the domestic tyranny that is the inevitable accompaniment of war. The great Randolph Bourne realized that "war is the health of the State." It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morale-as Albert Jay Nock once phrased it-of an "army on the march."
Randolph Bourne
I have long ago made a final and irrevocable decision. Nothing and no one, no pressure, cither from the right or from the left, will make me abandon the positions of perestroika and new thinking. I do not intend to change my views or convictions. My choice is a final one.
It is my profound conviction that the problems arising in the course of our transformations can be solved solely by constitutional means. That is why I make every effort to keep this process within the confines of democracy and reforms.
Mikhail Gorbachev
