Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Effort

"Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint." - Lewis H. Lapham

"To despise the animal basis of life, to seek value only at the level of conscious intelligence and rational effort, is ultimately to lose one's sense of cosmic relationships." - Lewis Mumford

"[Human progress] unites the person and the community; and one is not less necessary than the other. For without the social process the individual effort would be lost, and without the individual bid for freedom society would be curbed and confined, as most historic civilizations have in fact been confined, by its very success." - Lewis Mumford

"The political unification of mankind cannot be realistically conceived except as part of [the] effort at self-transformation." - Lewis Mumford

"That which we have not been forced to decipher, to clarify by our own personal effort, that which was made clear before, is not ours." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

"The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, as a unique – even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case – is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modern. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo-analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart… An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever-near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is leveled down." - Martin Buber

"Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner

"The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like the pie from the sky." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner

"The amount of effort put into a campaign by a worker expands in proportion to the personal benefits that he will derive from his party's victory." - Milton Rakove

"Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle." - Napoleon Hill

"Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye, and you will be drawn toward it. " - Napoleon Hill

"Anybody can do just about anything with himself that he really wants to and makes up his mind to do. We are capable of greater things than we realize. How much one actually achieves depends largely on: 1. Desire. 2. Faith. 3. Persistent Effort. 4. Ability. But if you are lacking the first three factors, your ability will not balance out the lack. So concentrate on the first three and the results will amaze you." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Sharpen your thinking about goal setting. Be realistic about the amount of time and effort that might be necessary. Make a commitment to excellence. Learn to distinguish between a goal and a wish. Prepare for ultimate goals by achieving your interim goals. Choose goals that will benefit others as well as yourself." - Norman Vincent Peale

"The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"The most essential requirement for a happy marriage is soul unity - similarity of spiritual ideals and goals, implemented by a practical willingness to attain those goals by study, effort, and self-discipline." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"The purpose of life is the evolution, though self-effort, of man’s limited mortal consciousness into God Consciousness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"My opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed." - Plato NULL

"The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a soul at the center of nature, and over the will of every man... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster." -

"If things are not going well with you, begin your effort at correcting the situation by carefully examining the service you are rendering, and especially the spirit in which you are rendering it." - Roger Babson, fully Roger Ward Babson

"Experience has taught me that financial success, job success and happiness in human relations are, in the main, the result of (a) physical well-being; (b) constant effort to develop one's personal assets; (c) setting up and working toward a series of life goals; (d) allowing time for meditation and spiritual regeneration." - Roger Babson, fully Roger Ward Babson

"Insecurity breeds greatness. To get to the top in virtually anything today, you really have to make a superhuman effort. You won't ever find a super-achiever anywhere who wasn't or isn't motivated, at least partially, by a sense of insecurity." - Ted Turner, fully Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III

"According to the effort is the reward." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"A man’s religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing." - Thomas Carlyle

"Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity." - Thomas Moore

"The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today." -

"An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful." - Thucydides NULL

"Knowledge and action are really two words describing the same, one effort." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an

"Most of one's life ... is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same." - Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda

"The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort. " - Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell

"Moderate effort over a long time is important, no matter what you are trying to do. One brings failure upon oneself by working extremely hard at the beginning, attempting to do too much, and then giving up after a short time. " -

"No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. " - Emma Goldman

"Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. " - Emma Goldman

"Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. " - Emma Goldman

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"Everything is a struggle, everything requires courage, effort. There is no response to history without effort, and effort is required because everything is difficult: passions, interests, rivalries, mankind just emerging from prehistory. Just look around us. Yes, history is tragic." - François Mitterand, fully François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterand

"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it." - Freeman John Dyson

"It takes no effort to love. The state has its own innate joy. Questions answer themselves if you are aware enough. Life is safe; flowing with the current of being is the simplest way to live. Resistance never really succeeds. Controlling the flow of life is impossible." - Deepak Chopra

"I believe our students must first seek to understand the conditions, as far as possible without national prejudices, which have led to past tragedies and should strive to determine the great fundamentals which must govern a peaceful progression toward a constantly higher level of civilization. There are innumerable instructive lessons out of the past, but all too frequently their presentation is highly colored or distorted in the effort to present a favorable national point of view. In our school histories at home, certainly in years past, those written in the North present a strikingly different picture of our Civil War from those written in the South. In some portions it is hard to realize they are dealing with the same war. Such reactions are all too common in matters of peace and security. But we are told that we live in a highly scientific age. Now the progress of science depends on facts and not fancies or prejudice. Maybe in this age we can find a way of facing the facts and discounting the distorted records of the past." - George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.

"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius. " - George Sand, pen name for Amandine Lucte Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant

"It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made." -

"Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless." - Granville Stanley Hall

"Thought has made me shameless. It does not matter at last at all if one is a little harsh or indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the mystery of things. Behind everything I perceive the smile that makes all effort and discipline temporary, all the stress and pain of life endurable. In the last resort I do not care whether I am seated on a throne or drunk or dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right and all things mine." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

"It takes a great deal of effort to make truth in writing so that the truth as one dreams it may have the best chance of being - not approached, not glimpsed - but better dreamed." - Hélène Cixous

"All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know." - Henry Spencer Moore

"Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. One must exercise proper deliberation, plan carefully before making a move, and be alert in guarding against relapse following a renaissance. " -