Quotes about Effort

Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

It's never crowded along the extra mile.

How do you learn to pray? Well how do you learn to swim? Do you sit in a chair with your feet up drinking coke learning to swim? You get down and you struggle. That's how you learn to pray.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.

The only thing ever achieved in life without effort is failure.

If my life is fruitless, it doesn't matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn't matter who criticizes me.

The Christian life, then, is a battle, so sharp and full of danger that effort can nowhere be relaxed without loss.

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest.

The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.

The young man evidently thought it too bad that he should be laughed at for his ignorance, and then laughed at for trying to remove it.