"Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost."
— Helen Keller

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"It is not given to us to know what difference we can make, and perhaps we can make no difference at all. But that is no reason not to make the attempt," said Saliman quietly. "The Light shines more brightly in the darkness."
— Alison Croggon (The Crow: The Third Book of Pellinor)

"Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom."
— Sandra Day O'Connor

""Men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.""
— Lloyd Jones

"I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. you think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required or character building. It’s a tragedy."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
— John F. Kennedy

"Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it."
— Samuel Johnson

"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed."
— Thomas Jefferson

"(about William Blake)

As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me."

And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy."

...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. "
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"Nil sine magno labore ("Nothing without great effort"). "
— Motto of Brooklyn College, New York

"The moment of realization or aha! is the outcome of dedicated effort. Constant and daily effort is important and necessary in any individual's life."
— SWAMINITYANANDA

"People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach."
— Marguerite de Navarre

"I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort."
— Harold Brodkey

"The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have
grown by it."
— Antonin Sertillanges (The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods)

"Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people."
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it"
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)