Quotes & Sayings About Lack Of Effort

In a congregation meeting, the pastor encouraged the congregation to make a new commitment to serve the people [at the trailer park]. One person stood up and said that past efforts had failed because the church lacked organization. Another person said that the church failed due to a lack of knowledge regarding the people's practical needs. Still another said that the church lacked evangelistic zeal.
In each case, the person offering criticism had the gifts to make the effort succeed! The person who saw a lack of organization had the gift of administration. The person who saw the lack of concern for practical needs had the gift of mercy. And the person who thought the church lacked evangelistic zeal had the gift of evangelism. What should have been a very successful outreach was short-circuited because they had not been using their gifts, the very gifts that were needed most. — Timothy Lane

The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life ... These realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces, which threaten to disfigure God's plan for creation. — Pope Francis

This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. — Albert Camus

The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education. — Umberto Eco

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope. — Dennis Lehane

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

Be still. it takes no effort to be still; it is utterly simple. When your mind is still, you have no name, you have no past, you have no relationships, you have no country, you have no spiritual attainment, you have no lack of spiritual attainment. There is just the presence of beingness with itself. — Gangaji

When people come into the office and say they've tried to make their marriage work, and I hear what the effort was, it seems to me that there's some lack of understanding of what effort is. — Peter D. Kramer

A God who chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the God of liberty ... who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke heavy for us - a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us betters us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul. — Jose Rizal

In the OED editors' defense, they have set out to accomplish something that is inherently impossible - to record the entirety of a language. It is only natural they should occasionally come across words that are virtually indefinable, or that have meanings that have been lost to the ages. Whatever failings or inconsistencies the editors may exhibit are certainly not for lack of effort. James Murray in particular was renowned for attempting to ferret out knowledge, writing letters to every authority he could think of and posting queries in newspapers begging for information on a word. When I read the definition of lege de moy ("App. the name of some dance") I cannot help but imagine that they must have spent a tremendous amount of time looking for the meaning and roots of this word before one of the editors finally threw his hands up in disgust and exclaimed, "What the hell - just say it's some kind of dance or something, and let's get to the pub." As — Ammon Shea

To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth. — Mary Church Terrell

Stop wishing & start doing! Your lack of effort won't affect a true hustlers ambition. Perseverance through adversity is key. — Behdad Sami

Researchers determined that a variety of forces affected the lack of change. First, the people in the community had been socialized not to disagree publicly, so it was hard to have a meaningful discussion. Second, in the past, any suggestions of change had been met with strong private criticism, so people were hesitant to bring creative ideas to the table. Finally, there was such a strong tradition of individualism in the community that members could not openly discuss problems, because they did not believe in collective effort as a way to solve problems. (Hibbard, 1986) — Paul Mattessich

Lack of self-confidence is, more often than not, simple laziness. We feel confused and uncertain because we do not know. But instead of making the effort to investigate, we procrastinate and worry. We tell ourselves we can't instead of learning how we can. If we used the mental energy we expend in worry and fear to get out and find out about what we do not know, we would see our self-confidence grow. Lack of self-confidence is not overcome by faith, but by action. It is a lack, not of certainty, but of effort. Too often we are certain that we can't before we give ourselves a fair chance. — Laurence Boldt

Stop bragging about your lack of sweat and effort in achieving your goals. Start bragging about how hard you work, how patient you've become. — Karen Salmansohn

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I understood very clearly that something was required of me, but could not guess what I was expected to do. Some persons, knowing that they were later going to ask a favour, would have made themselves more agreeable when a favour was being asked of them. That was not Widmerpool's way. I almost admired him for making so little effort to conceal his lack of interest in my own affairs, while waiting his time to demand something of myself. — Anthony Powell

When it comes to fighting, physical strength really has very little to do with it. One of the tenets that judo is founded upon is "Maximum efficiency, minimum effort." That has really defined my career. It is the foundation of all the techniques and everything I do. It's one reason why I don't get tired. It's one reason why I am able to fight girls who are a head taller than me, or chicks who are on steroids. People who cheat or dope lack the one thing every true champion must have: belief. No drug or amount of money or favoritism can ever give you belief in yourself. — Ronda Rousey

We are limited only by our lack of creativity. Our buildings should symbolize the exuberance of a free nation that encourages individual effort and creativity. — Douglas Cardinal

20. Lack of concentration of effort. The "jack-of-all-trades" seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim. — Napoleon Hill

God loves us just because of who we are, not because of what we do, not because we've got it all together, and not because of our efforts - or lack of effort . There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more, and there's nothing we can do to make him love us any less. — Kurt W. Bubna

So I make no effort to hide my pain. I don't ever put it all on display like this - but for today and all the rest of the days of the trial, I must. My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be
magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by the pundits and talking heads. But I'm told it's necessary; the world needs to see me vulnerable and wounded. I cannot appear not to care or to lack remorse, but that removes a crucial component of my self- defense mechanism and leaves me bleeding for all the world to see. I suppose that's rather the point. — Ann Aguirre

Allow yourself a space of quiet, wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Guard also against another kind of error: the folly of those who weary their days in much business, but lack any aim on which their whole effort, nay, their whole thought, is focused. — Marcus Aurelius

Why is networking not working? My answer is simple. Many business owners don't have a system in place to leverage their networking. Their time, effort and money spirals down the drain because they lack follow up. Instead of returning to your office, checking the email, and losing that business card in a graveyard box of business cards, continue connecting with your new acquaintance. One basic tip: Connect on social media within two days of meeting them. Personalize your message to them reminding them where you met. When you add this step, watch as your network expands exponentially. — Lisa A. Mininni

In order to win, we pay with energy and effort and discipline. If we lose, we pay in disappointment, discontent, and lack of fulfillment. — Maya Angelou

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn't make Gabriella and me the "mavericks" we'd both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy - a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now - to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there's someone around to inherit the place when the party is over - has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction — Lionel Shriver

The game has its ups and downs, but you can never lose focus of your individual goals and you can't let yourself be beat because of lack of effort. — Michael Jordan

The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, there is massive Islamic condemnation of the United States. — Jimmy Carter

Lack of persistence is one of the major causes of failure. Moreover, experience with thousands of people has proved that lack of persistence is a weakness common to the majority of men. It is a weakness which may be overcome with effort. — Napoleon Hill

The ascetic planet he sights is the planet of the practising as a whole, the planet of advanced-civilized humans, the planet of those who have begun to give their existence forms and contents under vertical tensions in countless programmes of effort, some more and some less strictly coded. When Nietzsche speaks of the ascetic planet, it is not because he would rather have been born on a more relaxed star. His antiquity-instinct tells him that every heavenly body worth inhabiting must - correctly understood - be an ascetic planet inhabited by the practising, the aspiring and the virtuosos. What is antiquity for him but the code word for the age in which humans had to become strong enough for a sacred-imperial image of the whole? Inherent in the great worldviews of antiquity was the intention of showing mortals how they could live in harmony with the 'universe', even and especially when that whole showed them its baffling side, its lack of consideration for individuals. — Peter Sloterdijk

As millions use social media as a primary source of information, the risk of falling victim to being misinformed is high. Readers who quickly scan newsfeeds tend to only read (and share information about) a headline: focusing on "the hook." Whether due to complacency or lack of time, few explore the content. This allows bogus media outlets to descend on the unsuspecting (and unprepared) seekers of instant information, creating false stories with dazzling one-liners, secure in the knowledge that there will be little effort to pursue confirmation or research an entire story. — Carlos Wallace

The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. to think more flexibly entails a risk-we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable. — Robert Greene

I was determined that if I failed it wouldn't be due to lack of effort. — Heston Blumenthal

Companies fail for lack of brains and effort. — Mark Cuban

So we're getting close to suggesting that camp is both the opposite of cool and a refinement of it. Camp and cool both have an element of not-caring, of disdain for the ordinary. The difference is that cool implies a lack of conscious effort, whereas camp is about putting everything you've got into it. Either you love something too much (much more than it's "worth", so the stereotypical anorak-wearing Doctor Who fan and the Barry Manilow cultist are both manifestations of this, at least to the outside world), or you're given to going over the top. Or you do both at once, in many cases. Both phenomena are examples of people fashioning an identity for themselves, and if you're reading this book then you must know people like that. Cool is not caring, camp is actively defiant. — Tat Wood

Sometimes Danielle fantasized about "waiting tables or working in some easy job where [she] didn't have to think or didn't make mistakes." But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves. For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort. It has to be done without too much help. And it cannot go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding - and from surviving some failures. — Meg Jay

That disables a lot of people from achieving goals, it is simply, a lack of willingness to pay for these goals, a lack of willingness to make great effort, a lack of willingness to sacrifice their comfort for those goals. — Orison Swett Marden

The seeds of genius are in many blogs, but bloggers lack the interest in or understanding of the difference between blogging and fully-formed literary efforts. — Lee Gutkind

Self-appraisals of efficacy are reasonably accurate, but they diverge from action because people do not know fully what they will have to do, lack information for regulating their effort, or are hindered by external factors from doing what they can — Albert Bandura

Over the years, there certainly have been plenty of ideas that I've had and given up on, but for this one, the only thing that was standing in its way was me doing it - I just had to write it ... And then if it didn't happen, it didn't happen. But I didn't want it to be for lack of effort on my part, so I had hunch that it would be a good story and that we would work well together. And it certainly worked out that way. — Paul Reiser

Neither my sexuality or my efforts or lack of effort on the football field make up the whole sum of me. — Sean Kennedy

(1) the commitment to ending the war successfully at the earliest possible moment; (2) the need to justify the effort and expense of building the atomic bombs; (3) the hope of achieving diplomatic gains in the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union; (4) the lack of incentives not to use atomic weapons; and (5) hatred of the Japanese and a desire for vengeance. — J. Samuel Walker

Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human. — Nicole Krauss

She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching. — Ayn Rand

Invariably, people who suffer from hoarding problems fail to maintain even the most rudimentary organization of their stuff - but not from lack of effort. Like Irene, most have spent countless hours trying to organize their possessions, with little success. Deficits in executive functions such as planning, categorization, organization, and attention leave them lost amid a sea of things, unable to figure out what to do next. — Gail Steketee

Given Mr. Obama's lack of experience as an executive, and his past performance in crises such as the oil spill, it is reasonable for those of us who support the effort in Afghanistan to worry that he will not be up to the job. — Jim Talent

For most people, lack of consistent, persistent effort is the biggest obstacle. — Edgar Cayce

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her - as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification. — John Irving

I realised that in refusing to take a vow man was drawn into temptation, and that to be bound by a vow was like a passage from libertinism to a real monogamous marriage. "I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows," is the mentality of weakness and betrays a subtle desire for the thing to be avoided. Or where can be the difficulty in making a final decision? I vow to flee from the serpent which I know will bite me, I do not simply make an effort to flee from him. I know that mere effort may mean certain death. Mere effort means ignorance of the certain fact that the serpent is bound to kill me. The fact, therefore, that I could rest content with an effort only, means that I have not yet clearly realised the necessity of definite action. "But supposing my views are changed in the future, how can I bind myself by a vow?" Such a doubt often deters us. But that doubt also betrays a lack of clear perception that a particular thing must be renounced. — Mahatma Gandhi

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor. (Eric Hoffer 1902-1983) — Eric Hoffer

No ... " said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure — Steve Largent

In the game of life, we all receive a set of variables and limitations in the field of play. We can either focus on the lack thereof or empower ourselves to create better realities with the pieces we play the game with. — T.F. Hodge

Jesus doesn't call people to childish behavior but to childlike faith. The qualities of humility, trust, receptivity and a lack of self-sufficiency all characterize the person of faith. The kingdom of God is not earned by human effort but is received in childlike trust as a gift of the mercy and grace of God. — Anonymous

The Lack of perseverance and effort isn't called Destiny ! — Shahryar Barani

When you focus upon lack in an attitude of complaining, you establish a vibrational point of attraction that then gives you access only to more thoughts of complaint. Your deliberate effort to tell a new story will establish a new pattern of thought, providing you with a new point of attraction from your present, about your past, and into your future. The simple effort of looking for positive aspects will set a new vibrational tone that will begin the immediate attraction of thoughts, people, circumstances, and things that are pleasing to you. — Esther Hicks

There were times when I'd bench players for their lack of effort. We worked very hard on fundamentals, which was the Dodger way. We needed to be more aggressive. — Dick Williams