Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential
—Winston Churchill
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—Peter Drucker
Just say something real. Everyone just always tries so hard, and it all comes out the same. I just want someone to say something real.
—Katie Alender in Bad Girls Don’t Die
Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Love shouldn’t make you feel like that. It should be as natural as breathing. It should happen between two people because it grew there out of something beautiful.
—A. Meredith Walters in Cloud Walking
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
—George Santayana
The greater the effort, the greater the glory.
—Pierre Corneille
Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
—Albert Einstein
Love isn’t perfect. It’s hard work and sometimes it’s more effort to be in love than it is to just run away. If you keep looking for perfect, the real thing is going to pass right by you.
—Jay Crownover in Jet
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
—Thomas A. Edison
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
—George Santayana
The world is full of hundreds of beautiful things we can never possibly have time to discover, and there is no time to be unkind or envious or ungenerous, and no sense in enslaving the mind to the trivialities of the moment. For you can be equal to the greatness of life only by marching with it; not by seeking love but by giving it, nor seeking to be understood but learning to understand. And when it is all over, there will be an agony of remorse because one spared the effort and did not make more of that little span of opportunity; and knowing reality at last, who knows but that one will look back with unassuageable regret upon one's pitiful little faith.
—Vivienne de Watteville
Give yourself something to work toward - constantly.
—Mary Kay Ash