1,905 Quotes About Effort

Every decision is easy once you make it. The important thing is to think carefully, make your decision, and then work to make your choice the right one. That is the secret to a happy life. There are very few wrong decisions in life, but very few people who are willing to make the effort it takes to make their decisions the right ones.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

It's only young people who make giant, life-altering decisions based on what other people might think, and it's because they don't see their own death looming. Their fear is, "Will my family, friends and lovers admire me?" whereas an older person's fear is that vision of themselves lying in a hospital bed, a breathing tube up their nose and the thought running through their heads, "Why didn't I at least try to do what I wanted to do, while I had the chance?

How do I shape my reality? I use wisdom and strategy to shift the possible to the probable... Then, effort and consistency will bridge the probable to the inevitable. Success is a behavior... I make sure my mindset and actions are working in alignment.

Civility is not a specific code of behavior as much as it is a call to unrelenting preemptive thought, and steady effort to care about influence on others.

Those who belong to the clan of achievers live the idea that inspires them to dedicate their existence, efforts, and soul to its execution.

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129)

It is hard to begin and harder to finish.

But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up.