Quotes & Sayings About Exertion

As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Was it worth while to lay
with infinite exertion
a roof I can't live under?
- All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading - not with indifference
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs. — Adrienne Rich

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates. — John Ruskin

Knowledge is prior to any particular knowledge, and exists not in the previous state of the individual, but of the race. It is potential, not actual, and can only be appropriated by strenuous exertion. — Plato

It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them. — Joseph De Maistre

Too much action with too little intent makes for wasteful exertion of energy and the confusion between movement and progress. — Steve Maraboli

The human race is but a monotonous affair. Most ofthemlabour the greater part oftheir time for mere subsistence; and the scanty portion of freedomwhich remains to themso troubles themthat they use every exertion to get rid ofit. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Perhaps the chief cause which has retarded the progress of poetry in America, is the want of that exclusive cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature would seem to require. Few here think of relying upon the exertion of poetic talent for a livelihood, and of making literature the profession of life. The bar or the pulpit claims the greater part of the scholar's existence, and poetry is made its pastime. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator — Thomas Jefferson

In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand. — Daniel Kahneman

There are thousands of men and women who go to churches and chapels every Sunday, and call themselves Christians. Their names are in the baptismal register. They are reckoned Christians while they live. They are married with a Christian marriage-service. They are buried as Christians when they die. But you never see any "fight" about their religion! Of spiritual strife, and exertion, and conflict, and self-denial, and watching, and warring they know literally nothing at all. Such Christianity . . . is not the Christianity of the Bible. It is not the religion which the Lord Jesus founded, and His Apostles preached. True Christianity is "a fight."3 — Timothy J. Keller

If you have a pack establishing dominance in an area that involves such physical exertion, you're sucking the life out of the opposition. — Ben Morgan

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. — Edgar Allan Poe

Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent. — Fran Lebowitz

With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief. — Washington Irving

Good men are sending the Bible to all parts of the world. Sermons are preached on behalf of fellows-creatures who are perishing in regions known only to us in name. And here, within reach of comparatively the slightest exertion; here, not many miles from churches and schools, and all the moral influences abounding in Christian society; here, in a country endowed with every advantage that God can bestow, are perishing, body and soul, our own countrymen: perishing too from disease, starvation and intemperance, and all the evils incidents to their unhappy condition. White men, Christian men, are driving them back; rooting out their very names from the face of the earth. Ah! these men can seek the country of the Sioux when money is to be gained: but how few care for the sufferings of the Dahcotahs! how few would give a piece of money, a prayer, or even a thought, towards their present and eternal good. — Mary H. Eastman

So, we pray well when we remain in this way in the presence of God, with no exertion of the understanding or will. Therefore, you will do well to listen to God in the urge you feel to return to us. — Vincent De Paul

Bit burrs. Tongue-tying. Saddling for exercise and saddling for races. There was shoeing and bandaging, conditioning and equipment. I had to learn to read track surfaces and stakes sheets, and calculate weight allowances. I had to know the diseases and ailments forward and back - bowed tendons and splints, foundering, bucked shins, bone chips, slab fractures, and quarter cracks. Thoroughbreds were glorious and also fragile in very specific ways. They often had small hearts, and the exertion of racing also made them susceptible to haemorrhaging in the lungs. Undetected colic could kill them - and — Paula McLain

There are four types of husbands.
The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman "shallow," a sort of peacock with arrested development.
Next comes the worshiper, the idolaters of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! It must be an exertion to be thought righteous!
And Anthony - a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony. — F Scott Fitzgerald

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. — John Ruskin

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy. — Mary Wollstonecraft

If I hold a twenty pound weight, I cannot detect a fly landing on it because the least detectable difference in the stimulus is half a pound. On the other hand, if i hold a feather, a fly landing on it makes a great difference. Obviously then, in order to be able to tell the differences in exertion one must first reduce the exertion. Finer and finer performance is possible only if the sensitivity, that is, the ability to feel the difference is improved. — Moshe Feldenkrais

We lost them in the vastness of their dresses and found them again, squeezed the pulp of their bodies and inhaled the perfume of their exertion. A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them. — Jeffrey Eugenides

For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment. On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light which illuminates all one's previous calculations, cuts and shuffles them and deals you the card of success, the winning number. — Blaise Cendrars

Firmness in enduring and exertion is a character I always wish to possess. I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint and cowardly resolve. — Robert Burns

The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands. — Maria Jeritza

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified. — Niels Bohr

Searching as the first step can make you cherish following benefits Discarding first will mean you have to carry on lesser "weight" along. Discarding the unneeded objects will enhance the sense of accomplishment. Lesser energy will be needed to arrange the remaining few. The duplication of work and resulting wastage of resources and physical exertion will be minimized. — InstanSum

If physical exercise were combined with mental exertion, the blood would be quickened in its circulation, the action of the heart would be more perfect, impure matter would be thrown off, and new life and vigor would be experienced in every part of the body. — Ellen G. White

Our painters skilled in extensive prep exertion for the finest finished painting results. Painting is cost-effective customs to ensure that your dwelling reflects a glance and feel you adore. Our Pasadena Painters in Ca will transform your home into a masterpiece. By creating or rejuvenating your own traits design statement. — Patrick Wilson

Feinstein examined the efficacy of various obesity treatments in a lengthy review in the Journal of Chronic Diseases, he dismissed exercise in a single paragraph. "There has been ample demonstration that exercise is an ineffective method of increasing energy output," Feinstein noted, "since it takes far too much activity to burn up enough calories for a significant weight loss. In addition, physical exertion may evoke a desire for food so that the subsequent intake of calories may exceed what was lost during the exercise. — Gary Taubes

A spade may be made of any size, and if the same number of strokes be made in the hour, the requisite exertion will vary nearly as the cube of the length of the blade. — William Stanley Jevons

I look forward serenely to the course of events, confident that the Fountain of supreme wisdom and virtue will provide for the happiness of his creatures ... Whenever the present storm subsides, I shall rush with eagerness into the bosom of private life, but while it continues, and while my country calls for the exertion of that little share of abilities, which it has pleased God to bestow on me, I hold it my indispensable duty to give myself to her. — Gouverneur Morris

New things always have to experience difficulties and setbacks as they grow. It is sheer fantasy to imagine that the cause of socialism is all plain sailing and easy success, without difficulties and setbacks or the exertion of tremendous efforts. — Mao Zedong

(Shoddiness is) the nature of human life. It takes an exertion to be indifferent to these things, but it's an exertion worth making. Also, it allows you luxuries like scorn and flippancy. — Thomas M. Disch

For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power. — Sengcan

Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war, the management of finances
all require the coordination of interrelated activities. What these complex undertakings share in common is the task of constructing a statement of actions to be performed, their timing and quantity (called a program or schedule), that, if implemented, would move the system from a given initial status as much as possible towards some defined goal — George Dantzig

Laughter is the most healthful exertion. — Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland

Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

A sacred pride should grip us of not being satisfied with the mediocre but to strive (for we can do it, if we want to) with the exertion of all our strength to attain the highest. Let us scorn what is of this earth, let us ignore what is of heaven, let us leave absolutely everything worldly behind us in order to hasten to the abode out of this world, in the proximity of the sublime deity. We do not need to think of stepping back. Of being satisfied with second rank, let us strive for dignity and glory. To attain the highest. — Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one. — John Ruskin

Is it not indeed, possible that, while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained "mute and inglorious"? I believe that the world has never seen - and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distateful exertion, the world will never see - that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable. — Edgar Allan Poe

Get into the habit of rewarding the intellectual exertion your child puts into a given task rather than his or her native intellectual resources. — John Medina

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. — Henry David Thoreau

Justice is that which is practiced by God himself, and to be practiced in its perfection by none but him. Omniscience and omnipotence are requisite for the full exertion of it. — Joseph Addison

The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

All that the YMCA's horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needs to climb in and out of the bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. — H.L. Mencken

The gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion. — Rebecca Solnit

Any place in our lives and heart where we are exerting our will and ways over God's will and ways will inevitably drain us of energy and resources. Exertion=Exhaustion. On the other hand, death to self requires only that we lay down at the foot of the cross and give up the right to run our lives. We say with Christ, "Not my will but Yours be done Father." The Crucified life is the entrance into true rest. #ComeAndDie — John Burton

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. — Robertson Davies

Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion. — B.C. Forbes

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

With self-denial and economy now, and steady self-exertion by-and-by, and object in life need not fail you. Venture not to complain that such an object is too selfish, too limited, and lacks interest; be content to labout for independence until you have proved, by winning that prize, your right to look higher. But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life - no true home - nothing to be dearer to me than myself, and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than I care to culture for myself only? Nothing, at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of labouring and living for others? — Charlotte Bronte

We must never despair; our situation has been compromising before, and it has changed for the better; so I trust it will again. If difficulties arise, we must put forth new exertion and proportion our efforts to the exigencies of the times. — George Washington

How could he forget her instructions days ago to deposit all her art supplies in the ballroom? Probably because that brain-muddling embrace outside the gallery scrambled clear thinking. He recalled the distraction of burying his face in the softness of her hair. Her presence seeped into him the same way her simple lemongrass scent invaded his senses. Right now, breathing heavily from exertion, he'd swear her scent surrounded him. — Gina Conkle

Theres a lot of muscles in your eyes even that you dont ever work, but little human traits like showing signs of exertion while running, you couldnt do that. Blinking when youre shooting a gun, you know. Things that you take for granted every day that had to be eliminated, so it was always interesting. — Kristanna Loken

In America, applause is won only by physical exertion. — David McCullough

I am most grateful for company this evening, even of the quiet variety. I am no great conversationalist, myself."
Gray snorted. Not a conversationalist. The girl had coaxed the life story out of every sailor in this ship.
She had just picked up her spoon again when Joss spoke.
"You do not find the voyage too tedious, Miss Turner?" Joss asked. "I regret that you are left to entertain yourself, being the sole passenger."
She laid down her spoon. "Thank you, Captain, but I find sufficient activity to occupy my hands and my mind. Reading, sketching, walking the deck for fresh air and healthful exertion. I'm surprisingly content, living at sea."
Gray's heart gave an odd kick. — Tessa Dare

Mrs. Dashwood remained at Norland several months; not from any disinclination to move when the sight of every well known spot ceased to raise the violent emotion which it produced for a while; for when her spirits began to revive, and her mind became capable of some other exertion than that of heightening its affliction by melancholy remembrances, she was impatient to be gone, and indefatigable in her inquiries for a suitable dwelling in the neighbourhood of Norland; for to remove far from that beloved spot was impossible. But she could hear of no situation that at once answered her notions of comfort and ease, and suited the prudence of her eldest daughter, whose steadier judgment rejected several houses as too large for their income, which her mother would have approved. — Jane Austen

Only people willing to work to the point of discomfort on a regular basis using effective means to produce that discomfort will actually look like they have been other-than-comf ortable most of the time. You can thank the muscle magazines for these persistent misconceptions, along with the natural tendency of all normal humans to seek reasons to avoid hard physical exertion. — Mark Rippetoe

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. — Henry David Thoreau

Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulates
riches. — Ludwig Von Mises

"Extra effort," in whatever form it takes (mental, physical, emotional), cannot be sustained without eventual damage and diminishing returns. There has to be a very acute awareness on your part as to the level of exertion and the toll it's taking on those you lead. — Bill Walsh

What keeps so many people back is simply unwillingness to pay the price, to make the exertion, the effort to sacrifice their ease and comfort. — Orison Swett Marden

Our only hope to speak with kindness, to lead with patience, and to not threaten our children with homicide is to ensure our spiritual reserves are not bone-dry. Moms are the middle of the flow chart; the arrows of exertion flow constantly out from us, but when no arrows of strength, grace, and peace are flowing in, the whole mechanism is in danger. Goodness in equals goodness out. — Jen Hatmaker

Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion. — Humphry Davy

But the truth about obedience in the kingdom of Jesus, as should be clear by now, is that it really is abundance. Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance. They are not two separate things. The inner condition of the soul from which strength and love and peace flow is the very same condition that generously blesses the oppressor and lovingly offers the other cheek. These Christlike behaviors are expressions of a pervasive personal strength and its joy, not of weakness, morbidity, sorrow - or raw exertion of will - as is so often assumed. And — Dallas Willard

So one always starts a journey in a strange land
taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all. — Graham Greene

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray Everything is fine - the first bits of sun are on the yellow flowers behind the low wall, people in cars are on their way to work, and I will never have to write again. Just looking around will suffice from here on in. Who said I had to always play the secretary of the interior? And I am getting good at being blank, staring at all the zeroes in the air. It must have been all the time spent in the kayak this summer that brought this out, the yellow one which went nicely with the pale blue life jacket - the sudden, tippy buoyancy of the launch, then the exertion, striking into the wind against the short waves, but the best was drifting back, the paddle resting athwart the craft, and me mindless in the middle of time. Not even that dark cormorant perched on the No Wake sign, his narrow head raised as if he were looking over something, not even that inquisitive little fellow could bring me to write another word. — Billy Collins

Readiness for action is the root of all kingly duties. Listen to the verse sung by Vrihaspati: By exertion the amrita was obtained, by exertion the asuras were slain and by exertion Indra obtained sovereignity in heaven and on earth. The heroes of exertion are superior to the heroes of speech. The heroes of speech gratify the heroes of exertion. — Meera Uberoi

One thing I love to do when I'm working out is take my watch off, take my heart strap off, and just run - not for time, not for exertion, but just to get the blood flowing. — Abby Wambach

There she stood, very pale and quiet, with her large grave eyes observing everything, - up to every present circumstance, however small. They could not understand how her heart was aching all the time, with a heavy pressure that no sighs could lift off or relieve, and how constant exertion for her perceptive faculties was the only way to keep herself from crying out with pain. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Some day, I must ask him what it's like to be married to someone who, eyes narrowed in thought, peers at him over the tops of sociology articles with titles like "Who Gets the Best Deal from Marriage: Women or Men?" We've had our disagreements, of course. When, for example, are a few dirty cups a symbol of the exertion of male privilege, and when are they merely unwashed dishes? — Cordelia Fine

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. — Karl Marx

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. — Wilkie Collins

My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention — Hope Jahren

When a man works by faith, he works by mental exertion instead of by physical force. — Joseph Smith Jr.

She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity. — Elizabeth Gaskell

As a reward of their clean living and good habits these great stars have been able to withstand the rigorous test of stamina and physical exertion and have thus successfully extended their most remarkable careers over a period of many strenuous years. — Major Taylor

In England, the profession of the law is that which seems to hold out the strongest attraction to talent, from the circumstance, that in it ability, coupled with exertion, even though unaided by patronage, cannot fail of obtaining reward. — Charles Babbage

The sounds of the thwacks seem very loud to my ears and I am grateful for the privacy of the royal box. I keep count in my mind until we're beyond sixty strikes and then find myself becoming consumed with the burning warmth of my behind. I imagine the colour it must be already and know that Sir is far from done. I hear his exertion as he lays into my
sore ass again and feel his hardness straining against the confines of his suit. I want to rub myself against it, but I don't dare. Now is the time to take my punishment like a good girl.It's what he wants and what I need. — Felicity Brandon

The half minute which we daily devote to the winding-up of our watches is an exertion of labour almost insensible; yet, by the aid of a few wheels, its effect is spread over the whole twenty-four hours. — Charles Babbage

Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor and power of the mind, displaying itself from within. — Ralph Cudworth

Every proper exertion has been made and will be continued to carry out the wishes of Congress in relation to the tobacco trade, as indicated in the several resolutions of the House of Representatives and the legislation of the two branches. — Martin Van Buren

Although to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant. — Charles Dickens

In respect to the danger of being killed by them, it is true that whoever does go must put his life in his hand, and not consult with flesh and blood; but do not the goodness of the cause, the duties incumbent on us as the creatures of God, and Christians, and the perishing state of our fellow men, loudly call upon us to venture all and use every warrantable exertion for their benefit? — William Carey

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. — Adam Smith

Souls cannot be saved without exertion. — Ellen G. White

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction. — Immanuel Kant

millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? — Henry David Thoreau

Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own. To say "going through the motions" - this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort - the labor, the motions, the dance - of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind. — Rebecca Skloot

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history. — P. J. O'Rourke

Let the Saints remember that great things depend on their individual exertion, and that they are called to be co-workers with us and the Holy Spirit in accomplishing the great work of the last days — Joseph Smith Jr.

Nothing could be purged without a body - no crying, no exertion, no pills to take away the pain or calm me down. Nothing. Instead, something ballooned inside me until I felt like I might explode. All I could do was sit there and drown in it, wondering why Claire affected me so much, wondering if she always would. — Courtney King Walker

Attaining achievement is not simple. It is not attain by chance, you have to work with it. There ought to be diligence and own path on the best way to accomplish achievement. It takes much time before having the tree grown foods of your work. As you come the way, you will know the things on the best way to be fruitful. Achievement needs time, exertion and tolerance. — Auliq Ice

In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does. — Hermann Von Helmholtz

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to the other — Henry David Thoreau

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in the river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And opening her arms wide, took my curly head within them, and gave it a good squeeze. I know it was a good squeeze, because, being very plump, whenever she made any little exertion after she was dressed, some of the buttons on the back of her gown flew off. And I recollect two bursting to the opposite side of the parlour, while she was hugging me. — Charles Dickens