Care and diligence bring luck.
—Thomas Fuller
Awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured: when there is a gap, awareness enters into us. So awareness does not require a certain particular effort. Such an effort is unnecessary. Awareness is like a wind. If you open your doors and windows, it is bound to come in.
—Chögyam Trungpa in The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation
Zen attacks that one last thing you hold dear: your precious self-conception. It unravels any notion of a freestanding, unconditional "I" and shows it to be a lie, a fabrication, a construction. True realization, the old masters tell us, takes bone-crushing effort. We pulverize the very skeleton of ego—upon which the meat and skin and organs of our illusions hang—and we do it through intense, hurtle-yourself-off-the-cliffs-and-into-the-chasm practice.
—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk
You never know how something will work out until you go for it.
—Shana Norris in The Boyfriend Thief
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
—James Richardson in Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
—Napoleon Hill
Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
—Brian Eno
You throw an anchor into the future you want to build, and you pull yourself along by the chain.
—John O'Neal
I don't think you realize how hard it is to always be reaching out to you, and to continually be rebuffed.
—Sarah Dessen in What Happened to Goodbye
I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.
—Abraham Lincoln
Do you ever feel like what's happening at this moment will never happen again? Like you could never repeat it, no matter how hard you tried?
—Jennifer E. Smith in Field Notes on Love