Quotes about Effort

Forgiveness is a full time job, and sometimes very difficult. Few of us always succeed, yet making the effort is our most noble calling. It is the world's only real chance to begin again.

Spiritual discipline: any activity I do by direct effort that will help me do what I cannot now do by direct effort.

We honestly think that we ourselves and those around us should be proficient with spiritual power, moving and acting with agility and endurance, wisdom and purity, able to conquer long-established habits of sloth and rebelliousness, simply on the basis of our desire and effort and sincerity...We have to train for the spiritual life.

But grace and effort are not opposites. Grace and earning are opposites.

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

We can be sure of talent; We can only pray for genius

If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.

Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance.

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.

Nothing important happens in life without a cost.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.