Effort Quotes - Page 35

• Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Stories, Littles, Reader

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• I don't know who the great lawyers are, and I presume you can't get to them. I know of no case where it can be said for certain that they took part. They defend some people, but you can't get them to do that through your own efforts, they only defend the ones they want to defend. But I assume a case they take on must have progressed beyond the lower court. It's better not to think of them at all, otherwise you'll find the consultations with the other lawyers, their advice and their assistance, extremely disgusting and useless.

  Franz Kafka

  Thinking, People, Advice

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• Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses.

  Charles Evans Hughes

  Selfish, Opportunity, Government

  Charles Evans Hughes (1910). “Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government”

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• With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!

  Jane Addams

  Mother, Children, Stupid

  Jane Addams (2016). “Twenty Years at Hull House”, p.109, Open Road Media

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• The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.

  Jane Addams

  Cities, Hull House, Problem

  Jane Addams (1949). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.70, Hayes Barton Press

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• His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Atheist, Enemy, Important

  "Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason". Book by Andrew Dickson White, pp. 167-168, 1915.

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• I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

  Barack Obama

  America, World, Morality

  "Guantanamo Bay Still Unresolved". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. January 14, 2013.

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• You've got to try everything once, except those things you don't like, or that involve a lot of effort and getting up early.

  Tibor Fischer

  Up Early, Trying

  "The Thought Gang". Book by Tibor Fischer, 1994.

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• The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.

  Eric Hoffer

  Thinking, Soul, Atmosphere

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.

  Georg Brandes

  Race, Trying, Century

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.14, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Building Up, Desire

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.

  Samuel Hopkins Adams

  Running, Yelling, Ordinary

  Samuel Hopkins Adams (2015). “Average Jones”, p.5, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Sports, Baseball, Writing

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.

  Andre Maurois

  Love, Anxiety, Flesh

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.

  Plato

  Education, Ideas, World

  Plato, Julius A. Sigler (1997). “Education: Ends and Means”, p.19, University Press of America

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• Isaiah calls the Church barren because her children are born without effort by the Word of faith through the Spirit of God. It is a matter of birth, not of exertion.

  Martin Luther

  Children, Church, Matter

  Martin Luther (2007). “Commentary on Galatians”, p.101, Lulu.com

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• Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Play, Games, Perfection

  Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India), Aurobindo Ghose (1962). “Bulletin”

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• I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

  Jane Austen

  Writing, Style, Rich

  Jane Austen (1906). “Letters”

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• A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

  Edgar Degas

  Artist, Men, Appearance

  "Degas Danse Dessin" by Paul Valéry, translated by David Paul; Princeton University Press, (p. 84), 1989.

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• I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

  Luigi Pirandello

  Art, Hate, Order

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• As you get older, you get stuck in your ways; just as you become stiffer physically, you also become stiffer mentally and more narrow-minded unless you make a conscious effort to keep yourself flexible.

  Viggo Mortensen

  Way, Conscious, Stuck

  "Viggo Mortensen, Man of the World". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 5, 2015.

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• Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.

  Charles A. Beard

  Destiny, Mirrors, Evil

  "Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science". The American Political Science Review Volume 21, Issue 1, February 1927.

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• Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.

  Albert J. Nock

  People, Publicity, Kind

  "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man". Book by Albert J. Nock, 1943.

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• I don't think I've ever made a conscious effort to alter the sound. I don't see the point. I have to remain true to how I sing. I'm perfectly happy with what I am. Whatever that is.

  Steven Morrissey

  Thinking, Sound, Conscious

  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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• Of course, the entire effort is to put myself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.

  Stephen Spender

  Ordinary, Statistics, Hundred

  Stephen Spender (2015). “New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.151, Faber & Faber

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