"It's hard to beat a person who never gives up."
— George Herman Ruth

"Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. "
— Raymond Chandler

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it."
— Henry David Thoreau

"No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. "
— Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)

"Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing."
— Thomas Jefferson

"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
— Beverly Sills

"Dont ask God to make life easier, ask him to make you a stronger person"
— Anonimous

""I know it seems hard sometimes but remember one thing. Through every dark night, there's a bright day after that. So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out, keep ya head up.... and handle it.” "
— Tupac Shakur

"He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"We don't usually write up accidents involving rabbits.
- Joe Morelli "
— Janet Evanovich (Hard Eight)

"There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while."
— Nick Hornby (About a Boy)

"If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault."
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse. "
— Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)

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

"I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.

Character building, my father said.

Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.

Still, it was better than jail.

I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Twisted)

"Samuel McDermott or not, I was Ian McDermott, and the way I saw life was the way I'd live life."
— Michael Harmon

"The idea that the harder you work, the better you're going to be is just garbage. The greatest improvement is made by the man or woman who works most intelligently."
— Bill Bowerman

"The hardest part isn't finding what you need to be, it's being content with who you are."
— The Ataris

"A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. "
— Mildred W. Struven

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

""That was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever had to learn about anything. That she is her own, and what she gives me is her choosing and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come sit on your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or another, it and it's choice to be there are gone. "
"
— Ann

"They can say whatever I'ma do whatever no pain is forever
Yup! you know this
Tougher then a lion ain't kno need in trying I live where the sky ends
Yup! you kno this
"
— Rihanna

"He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been, in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away, by the fervour of this reproach."
— Charles Dickens

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
— Stephen King

"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?"
— Ronald Reagan

"This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It's a strange thing. I hardly find anybody today who doesn't agree that the ledger should not determine how we live. Most people think it's terrible that the pollution in Lake Michigan is being decided by how much it'll cost companies to cure it. People are realizing that an environment is being created that will be as dangerous for capitalists to live in as well as for the working people...that it's insane to let major things be decided on the basis of black figures and red figures. I find temperate people saying today that the business-motivated system isn't a safe thing to have around."
— Fred Thompson- of the IWW not the recent presidential candidate