Quotes & Sayings About Exhausting Yourself

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear. — Albert Camus

For instance, some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman's job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women, memorized by Jewish husbands for the purpose of honoring their wives at the family table. It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard. — Sarah Bessey

A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort. — B.F. Skinner

Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself. — Richard Flanagan

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me. — Jodie Foster

I work really long hours and work a lot and have done press tours and junkets, but there is nothing like a presidential campaign that I have experienced before ... I think at one point we visited three different cities in one state in 12 hours. It's exhausting. — America Ferrera

But I know what it means to crave what you're not. To want to sew up that rift because it's exhausting to hold it open. Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn't care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can't have it. — Vanessa Veselka

He was quiet, cooperative. He'd made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It's a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job. — Glen Duncan

The endless bonking was exhausting me. — Joan Collins

Not to be alone - ever - is one of my ideas of hell, and a day when I have had no solitude at all in which 'to catch up with myself' I find mentally, physically and spiritually exhausting. — Miss Read

Today's milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation — Julia Kristeva

I always had this thing, when I was younger especially, I didn't want to do movies that much. I found they took a lot out of you and they were exhausting for me in a lot of ways. — Al Pacino

But how? How can you just get over these things, darling? ... You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'
'I choose to ... I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'
'But it's not that easy.'
He smiled that Frank smile. 'Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.' p.323 — M.L. Stedman

Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature - unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause. — William Beveridge

He's weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It's exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it's an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy's skirts. — Ben H. Winters

Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I'm living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It's exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you're not joining in. — Paula Hawkins

The problem with driving around Iceland is that you're basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It's totally exhausting. — Stephen Markley

Those who are driven by poverty, those who're free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning. — Kathy Acker

I grew up in one of the biggest high schools in the world, and that's the Disney Channel. Everybody was falling in love with each other or not liking each other, and it was exhausting and I was the shy one in the corner. And now I'm so opinionated, and I don't have time for the cattiness. I have good people around me, and I'm glad I'm at the place I'm in. I wish I was there back then. — Selena

Most people don't understand that being in the public eye is emotionally exhausting. It takes a lot out of you. — Tabitha King

Or I can forgive and forget ... Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... we always have a choice. — M.L. Stedman

Falling in love and trying to make someone fall in love with you and working to stay in love and forcing yourself to fall out of love with someone who will never love you back is much, much more exhausting than being alone. — Marla Miniano

Grief is exhausting. When you learn - maybe through my age or experience - trying to harness the energy, whatever it is, muted energy or a concentration to find yourself in a place? You try to use it for when it's really necessary and can arrive. — Ciaran Hinds

All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done. — Thomas Sowell

I used to say I didn't want to teach. I was still excited about dancing. It's hard to do both. It's as exhausting teaching as it is to dance. — Patricia McBride

At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow. — Kelly Corrigan

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. — Millard Kaufman

September was a thirty-days long goodbye to summer, to the season that left everybody both happy and weary of the warm, humid weather and the exhausting but thrilling adventures. It didn't feel like fresh air either, it made me suffocate. It was like the days would be dragging some kind of sickness, one that we knew wouldn't last, but made us uncomfortable anyway. The atmosphere felt dusty and stifling. — Lea Malot

RULE #1
Market your business to the customer YOU WANT.
Most beauty businesses try to be everything to everyone. It's exhausting and expensive promoting yourself to everyone. Most people simply give up.
Focus on the customers you really want. What is your passion, what do you excel in? Who is your ideal customer? What would you ideally like to do every day in your business?
Focus on what you want to do and the clients you want, and market directly to them and only them. — Jana Elston

To me, it was a human story about what it costs to be yourself, and the reward too. It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don't have integrity, life becomes exhausting. I wonder how many people get tempted by the gains they can make by playing a role, only to pay for those temptations in public isolation. — Donald Miller

The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'. — Twyla Tharp

Whatever God or whatever higher power you believe in, they brought us to this earth in a perfect way, and you have to learn to love yourself. Otherwise, it's an exhausting way to be. — Callie Thorne

It's like that old saying: You can't please anybody, so you might as well be alone. (Actually, I don't think that's the saying. I think it's actually, You can't please everybody, so you might as well just please yourself. Whatever. They're both exhausting.) — Jen Cross

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say. — Francois Mauriac

Initiate giving. Don't wait for someone to ask. See what happens - especially to you. You may find that you gain a greater clarity about yourself and about your relationships, as well as more energy rather than less. You may find that, rather than exhausting yourself or your resources, you will replenish them. Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient ... only the universe rearranging itself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

But you now, you wear your soul on your sleeve, exhausting your energy, propping yourself up on a tree, mumbling, or bent over your desk, asleep. Heaven gives you a form and you wear it out by pointless argument. — Zhuangzi

No one likes to think of himself as a coward. People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it's safer or more convenient, but because it's the right thing..Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror's bidding, it's not because they're terrified but because they're socially concerned.' [George Jonas]
This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It's easier to appease it, but, for the sake of your self-esteem, you have to tell yourself you're appeasing is in the cause of some or other variant of 'social justice'. — Mark Steyn

According to Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, if you're feeling an intense emotion like anxiety or anger, there are two ways to manage it: surface acting or deep acting. Surface acting involves putting on a mask--modifying your speech, gestures, and expressions to present yourself as unfazed...In deep acting, known as method acting in the theater world, you actually become the character you wish to portray. Deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them...Deep acting turns out to be a more sustainable strategy for managing emotions than surface acting. Research shows that surface acting burns us out: Faking emotions that we don't really feel is both stressful and exhausting. If we want to express a set of emotions, we need to actually experience them. — Adam Grant

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world. — Ann Patchett

This guilt is a joke, and it's exhausting to watch you martyr yourself. — Ann Aguirre

Trying to obey and serve God before we've come to love Him can be exhausting. — Beth Moore

Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life? — Caroline Knapp

Even one who has been to God a million times with the same problem need not fear exhausting the grace of God. — Tullian Tchividjian

The only way I can cope with me and my environment is to have this kind of wall around me. I'm exhausting myself. — Manolo Blahnik

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it - and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.
So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then ... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are. — Naomi Alderman

Having to be strong and act hard when I knew I was anything but was exhausting, and I wanted more than anything to let go, even if it was just for a little bit. — O.E. Boroni

I could use a little monotony in my life. Spontaneity is exhausting. — A Meredith Walters

9/11/01
Gina:
Especially today, with the enormity of current events, I want to convey to you again, how much you mean to me and how proud I am to be your husband. The hard work that you are engaged in right now is exhausting, invisible and largely thankless in the short term.
But honey, please know that buried at the core of this tedium is the most noble and important work in the world- God's work; the fruits of which you and I will be lucky enough to enjoy as we grow old together. Watching these little guys grow into men is a privilege that I am proud to share with you, and the perfect fulfillment of our marriage bonds.
You are a great mom.
You are a great wife.
You are my best friend.
You are very pretty.
Happy Birthday.

-Matt — Michael Spehn

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long - more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body - all the vital organs and living tissues - to this incredible heart. — Hamza Yusuf

I totally love my job, and I wake up every day basically thinking about how can I do my job better. It never feels like a job. It's hard, and it's exhausting sometimes, but it never feels like - I would do this even if they didn't pay me to do it. That's a pretty amazing feeling. — Brit Marling

Eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early, the exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace. — Mary Doria Russell

Every time we click the shutter, it's like a new day, a new chance to make a clean start, to be original. It's a very exciting and exhausting thing to do. — Maggie Steber

Will you have kids?"
"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."
"As a parent?"
"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."
"You'll find it's kind of tough to canvass the opinion of sperm."
"I prefer asking the eggs - they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"
"Exactly why decent people need to have kids. — Tom Rachman

Motherhood:
The most exhausting, emotional, rewarding
and life-enhancing journey a woman can take. — Charlotte Pearson

The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The righteous ones are always exhausting to have around. — Alexandra Adornetto

When you're doing what you love, it's not exhausting at all, actually. It's completely empowering and exhilarating. — Billy Porter

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework. — Angela Davis

Joy could be as exhausting as grief. — Helen Kieran Reilly

Making a film, I've learned, can be an exhausting process, due to the need for backing, distribution, etc. — Anne Rice

The fallen prince is exhausting. I don't know how Mare could stand him or his inability to choose a damned side-especially when there's only one side he can possibly pick. — Victoria Aveyard

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom. — Edith Wharton