Human Effort Quotes & Sayings

Manly P. Hall states in his book The Mystical Christ: "Mysticism has been called the path of pain, not because its way is one of suffering, but because most are brought to recognition of realities by temporal or physical misfortunes. In the human experience, suffering nearly always resolves itself into a question. This uncertainty inspires a larger effort to discover the rules governing human activity. — Terry McBride

Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains. — James Henry Breasted

Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It's so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn't about killing. It's about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you've got no dog. If you can understand why he's biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn't dead. He isn't even your enemy. — Orson Scott Card

My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education. — Gary Becker

A lobster, when left high and dry among the rock, does not have the sense enough to work his way back to the sea, but waits for the sea to come to him. If it does not come, he remains where he is and dies, although the slightest effort would enable him to reach the waves, which are perhaps within a yard of him. The world is full of human lobsters; people stranded on the rocks of indecision and procrastination, who, instead of putting forth their own energies, are waiting for some grand billow of good fortune to set them afloat. — Orison Swett Marden

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. — Ayn Rand

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer's labor goes into designing the story designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. — Robert McKee

Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women's march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach. — Aysha Taryam

I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience ...
War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort
by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion
to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war. — Howard Zinn

This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of
history', of post-modernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity',
or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the
arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under
which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long
effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its
'natural limit' . — Zygmunt Bauman

He glanced helplessly at Ruby, hoping for some help. She was a scribe and had more experience with dwarves than the six hours that Durham had acquired. He's assumed that, as a fellow human, she would make an effort to be some sort of cultural ambassador to help him survive past lunch. Ruby's current interpretation of being helpful seemed to be a silent smirk. — Jeffery Russell

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism. The individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. — Ortega Y Gasset

It is not enough simply to wish that love and compassion should increase in us. We need to make a sustained effort, again and again, to cultivate the positive aspects within us - and the key here is constant familiarity. The nature of human thoughts and emotions is such that the more you engage in them, the more you consciously develop them, the more powerful they become. — Dalai Lama

If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it! — Eleanora Duse

Oh, no! I promise it's not human," Mom bats her hands in the air in an effort to wrangle them back into their seats. "It's newborn calf."
"Oh, Hon, we don't do baby legs neither. — Addison Moore

People are generally resistant to teaching and training because it requires effort. This clashes with the natural wiring of human adults: We are fundamentally lazy. — B. J. Fogg

There is no greater miracle than our conscious efforts to become good human beings. — Sri Chinmoy

Both group effort and individual testimony flow from conviction as to the role of people on earth. In stewardship of the common heritage, a few simple beliefs recur: that all are indeed members of the same human family, that all share in responsibility for the others, that each is capable of responding directly to divine guidance. To seek to translate these into practical action with regard to soil or petroleum or the fish of the sea is not necessarily to do what is directly effective in changing society. — Gilbert F. White

The requirements of the theatre are very great
a strong constitution, energy and unflagging purpose, charm of feature, these alone do not necessarily mean anything, and they must not be relied upon as assurances of an easy conquest of the public heart. It is not only a question of fitness for the work, but of long years of most diligent effort to master the technique of the theatre, and to develop whatever of the art instinct we may possess upon the simplest, broadest, and most human lines. — Julia Marlowe

Human kindness has no reward. You should give to others in every way you see. expect absolutely nothing from anyone. It should be your goal to love every human you encounter. All human suffering that you're aware of and continues without your effort to stop it becomes your crime. — Louis C.K.

A human beings' perception of reality emanates from viewing the universe, which is in a constant state of creation and destruction. The universe in which we move and work in outlasts human interests, hopes, expectations, and joy, and all forms of aversion, effort, pain, and humiliation. The world outlasts our dreams, love songs, bouts of inanity and anxiety, it outlast regrets, remorse, and shame. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature - the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds - which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices. — Ruth Ozeki

Being a decent human being will require effort and energy ... — David Nicholls

There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards. — Kenzaburo Oe

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. — E. M. Forster

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. — Lewis Thomas

It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science — Simone De Beauvoir

Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience. — C. G. Jung

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. — Nick Harkaway

When you are knitting socks and sweaters and scarves, you aren't just knitting. You are assigning a value to human effort. You are holding back time. You are preserving the simple unchanging act of handwork. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance. — Ayn Rand

When we really keep in the forefront of our thoughts that our intention in this life is to recover and be free, then being of service, practicing meditation, and doing what we need to do to get free becomes the only rational decision. This takes discipline, effort, and a deep commitment. It takes a form of rebellion, both inwardly and outwardly, because we not only subvert our own conditioning, we also walk a path that is totally countercultural. The status quo in our world is to be attached to pleasure and to avoid all unpleasant experiences. Our path leads upstream, against the normal human confusions and sufferings. — Noah Levine

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries. — Andrew Dalby

Making the effort to improve as a human being is what Coach Lombardi was all about. He was able to see the gap between where we were and what we could become-both as football players and as people. And he felt it was his God-given responsibility to close that gap. — Jerry Kramer

There is no tomorrow. Time cannot be saved and spent. There is only today and how we choose to live it. The future is unknowable and unpredictable; it offers no clear path to happiness. Science will not save us. Each of us, then, needs to cobble together a daily routine filled with basic human pleasures, wedded, to be sure, to the best that modernity has to offer. It is a life of compromise rather than extremes. It is a touch of the old and a taste of the new. And cooking, it seems to me, offers the most direct way back into the very heart of the good life. It is useful, it is necessary, it is social, and it offers immediate pleasure and satisfaction. It connects with the past and ensures the future. Standing in front of a hot oven, we remind ourselves of who we are, of what we are capable of and how we might stumble back to the center of happiness. Effort and pleasure go hand in hand. — Christopher Kimball

The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. — Daniel James Brown

Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride. p. 380 — Charles Frazier

It is the duty and high privilege of every human being to endeavor to improve himself. Effort at self-improvement is the definition sometimes given for religion. It may relate to our actions or to our convictions. In our actions we should aim at goodness; in our convictions, at truth. — Joseph P. Bradley

Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are most menaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role in policy formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of our emphasis that is expressed through our institutions. — Terence McKenna

There is a fundamental law that the tissue of the human body will waste away through idleness and disuse. Conversely, muscles and vessel that are stressed grow and increase in capacity. This same basic law also applies to spiritual and intellectual growth and can be achieved only by continual nourishment and effort in day-to-day living. — Clarence Robison

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity. — William Howard Taft

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered ... We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. — Elizabeth Edwards

I was reading voraciously about global issues such as clean water, community development, war, human trafficking, economics, disaster relief, the AIDS crisis, unjust systemic evil. Meanwhile, church budgets made room for a brand-new light show and a kickin' sound system or a trip to Disneyland or a video venue in a saturated upscale neighborhood - all in an effort to practice creative-experience marketing. — Sarah Bessey

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better. — Edsger Dijkstra

Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. — Horace Mann

I want to stress again that human rights are not peripheral to the foreign policy of the United States. Our pursuit of human rights is part of a broad effort to use our great power and our tremendous influence in the service of creating a better world, a world in which human beings can live in peace, in freedom, and with their basic needs adequately met. — Jimmy Carter

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human. — Paul McCartney

If it turns out that physical death truly results in the absolute cessation of consciousness, then it would seem to me that in the grand truth of things, every human who has ever lived, who has not committed every minute of their lives toward an effort in finding a cure for mortality, has died as an utter and miserable failure. — Derek R. Audette

I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort ... then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world. — Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state ... Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife. — Marie-Helene Bertino

Truth and effort may increase human worth
But they are not enough to make us whole;
Only love can complete us. — Ilchi Lee

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion. — Lewis Mumford

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself. — Herbert Marcuse

When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures - anything except individual behavior - and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will. — Jason L. Riley

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall
that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary. — Henry A. Kissinger

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment ... — Edgar Allan Poe

The effort to cure disease has been, without doubt, the greatest curse that has ever been perpetrated upon the human race. The idea that disease is something that must be cured, the idea that it is something that can be cured, must be eradicated from the human mind before we can hope to arrive at a rational solution of our health problems. — Herbert M. Shelton

That view of the Cross, it cannot be denied, runs counter to the mind of the natural man. It is not, indeed, complicated or obscure; on the contrary it is so simple that a child can understand, and what is really obscure is the manifold modern effort to explain the Cross away in such fashion as to make it more agreeable to human pride. — J. Gresham Machen

In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space? — H.L. Mencken

The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It — Mark Twain

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. — George MacDonald

Humankind's constant effort to fix its shortcomings is what drives human history. — Joel Garreau

Books had been invented to salve human loneliness, and they were friends without peer, friends who never sneered or flinched or laughed behind a man's back. Books revealed their treasures to all who took the effort to seek. — Mary Jo Putney

My effort has been not only to put the Biblical incident in the original setting ... but at the same time give the human touch to convey to my public the reverence and elevation these subjects impart to me. — Henry Ossawa Tanner

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. — Olaf Stapledon

When I went in for the [ Embraced] DVD interviews, I thought, "Good lord, it's 17 years later!" I thought that maybe I should do my make-up differently and put extra effort in, or I'd look like a different human being. It's very strange. — Brigid Brannagh

Books saved you. Having become your refuge, they sustained you. The power of books, this marvelous invention of astute human intelligence. Various signs associated with sound: different sounds that form the word. Juxtaposition of words from which springs the idea, Thought, History, Science, Life. Sole instrument of interrelationships and of culture, unparalleled means of giving and receiving. Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress. They enabled you to better yourself. What society refused you, they granted. — Mariama Ba

The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous ... — Sri Aurobindo

Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us. — Dorothea Lange

When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being." That — Trevor Noah

Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton - these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men's footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Some people regard the meek man as one who will not put up a fight for anything but will let others run over him. . . . In fact from human experience we know that to accomplish anything good a person must make an effort; and making an effort is putting up a fight against the obstacles. - Father Emil Kapaun — Roy Wenzl

The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In his book Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Zipf argues that he has found a unifying principle, the Principle of Least Effort, which underlies essentially the entire human condition (the book even includes some questionable remarks on human sexuality!). The Principle of Least Effort argues that people will act so as to minimize their probable average rate of work (i.e., not only to minimize the work that they would have to do immediately, but taking due consideration of future work that might result from doing work poorly in the short term). — Christopher Manning

The human mind has a tendency to observe unsystematic events and assign a pattern to the results. A habitual risk-taker reorganizes the stream of random events and retrospectively attributes the outcome of indiscriminate trials to their own gambling "strategies." We often hear people say that they are lucky or unlucky, when in actuality they can claim no ownership in the occurrence of chaotic outcomes. A false sense of the existence of luck can cause people to discount the value of their actual effort, skill, and training. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The mysterious manner in which this growing sense of unity commingles with a sense of utter goodness is worth noting. It arises by no effort of mine; rather does it come to me out of I know not where. Harmony appears gradually and flows through my whole being like music. An infinite tenderness takes possession of me, smoothing away the harsh cynicism which a reiterated experience of human ingratitude and human treachery has driven deeply into my temperament. I feel the fundamental benignity of Nature despite the apparent manifestation of ferocity. Like the sounds of every instrument in an orchestra that is in tune, all things and all people seem to drop into the sweet relationship that subsists within the Great Mother's own heart. — Paul Brunton

I have also come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love. — Matthieu Ricard

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act. — Primo Levi

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty ... I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well. — Theodore Roosevelt

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction. — Anthony Giddens

Perhaps immortality is a gift of heaven rather than the result of some human effort. — Wang Yangming

We must be constantly aware that Satan can take any human effort and twist it to serve his own purposes. — Billy Graham

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493 — Ivan Goncharov

The Catholic Church also opposes any effort to make it easier to deport children; last week, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis E. George, said he had offered facilities in his diocese to house some of the children, and on Monday, bishops in Dallas and Fort Worth called for lawyers to volunteer to represent the children at immigration proceedings. "We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country," said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don't know how to respond." Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now deadlocked. — Anonymous

(...) all men are united in one common effort to survive on this earth. All men share a common human necessity, a common human aim. All men are equally entitled to life, and therefore to the necessities of life. — Rose Wilder Lane

From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the greatest effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly acquired behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature. — Peter Sloterdijk

Improving the human condition takes little effort; destroying it takes maximum force. — T.F. Hodge

I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [ ... ] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort — Henry Miller

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life. — W.E.B. Du Bois

For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. — Joseph Conrad

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent. — Aldrich Ames

Personal prayer, it seems to me, is one of the simplest necessities of life, as basic to the individual as sunshine, food and water-and at times, of course, more so. By prayer I mean an effort to get in touch with the Infinite. We know that our prayers are imperfect. Of course they are. We are imperfect human beings. A thousand experiences have convinced me beyond room of doubt that prayer multiplies the strength of the individual and brings within the scope of his capabilities almost any conceivable objective. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nature loves efficiency, which is very odd for something supposedly working at random. When you drop a ball, it falls straight down without taking any unexpected detours. When two molecules with the potential for bonding meet, they always bond- there is no room for indecision. This expenditure of least energy, also called the law of least effort, covers human beings, too. Certainly our bodies cannot escape the efficiency of the chemical processes goings on in each cell, so it is probable that our whole being is wrapped up in the same principle. This argument also applies to personal growth- the idea that everyone is doing the best he or she can from his or her own level of consciousness — Deepak Chopra

For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. — E.F. Schumacher

Perhaps only when human effort had done it's best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work. — Corrie Ten Boom