effort

1.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

- Colby, Frank Moore

2.

There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

- Hoffer, Eric

3.

Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort or try another approach is the secret of winning.

- Waitley, Denis

4.

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

5.

I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.

- Gandhi, Mahatma

6.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

7.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

- Dewey, John

8.

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

- Hill, Napoleon

9.

What keeps so many employers back is simple unwillingness to pay the price, to make the exertion, the effort to sacrifice their ease and comfort.

- Marden, Orison Swett

10.

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

- Ruskin, John

11.

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.

12.

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do? I don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him? To shrug.

- D'Anconia, Francisco

13.

If someone had told me I would be pope one day, I would have studied harder.

- Pope John I

14.

There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant.

- Liu Shao-Ch'I

15.

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

- Lombardi, Vince

16.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

- Roosevelt, Theodore

17.

Happiness is a by product of an effort to make someone else happy.

- Palmer, Gretta Brooker

18.

The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

19.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

- Gandhi, Mahatma

20.

I should like to make every one I meet discontented with themselves; I should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent first of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.

- Lecture on Science of Health. 1872.