''Doing your own thing'' is a generous act. Being gifted creates obligations, which means you owe the world your best effort at the work you love. You too are a natural resource.
About the only thing that comes without effort is old age..
Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.
Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more.
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
champions know there are no shortcuts to the top. They climb the mountain one step at a time. they have no use for helicopters!
Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there — or failing to get there.
Do your duty, that is best; leave unto the Lord the rest.
Easy DOESN'T do it.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.
For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.
Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.
God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.
Have you ever watched a stonecutter at work? He will hammer away at a rock for perhaps a 100 times without a crack showing in it. Then, on the 101st blow, it will split in two. It is not that blow alone which accomplished the result, but the 100 others that went before as well.
I don't believe people die from hard work. They die from stress and worry and fear — the negative emotions. Those are the killers, not hard work. The fact is, in our society today, most people don't understand what hard work is all about.
I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win — if you don't you won t.
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.