Quotes about Striving

Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work.

[O]nly if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.

The free society does not guarantee virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed: it has to be won through personal striving.

This life of supreme blessedness is an end, and the pilgrim who is striving towards it, the prodigal returning to it, must travel thither, and employ means to get there. He must pass through the country of his animal desires, disentangling himself from their intricacies, simplifying them, overcoming them; this is the way, and he has no enemies but what spring within himself.

A woman who is striving invites others to strive. The message—sometimes implicit in her actions, sometimes explicit through her words—is, "Get your act together. Life is uncertain. There is no time for your heart here. Shape up. Get busy. That's what is important." She does not say, "All is well. All shall be well." Her fear doesn't allow it. She is withholding the very things her world needs.

Few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling short, sabotaging your own efforts at every turn. Discouragement and shame settle in like a long Seattle rain. And this is what most Christians experience as the Christian life: Try harder; feel worse.

To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good.

Perfection isn't attainable, that's why we demand it from others.

Do your best, and be a little better than you are.

He is an educated man in the best sense of the word — mindful always that there is no such thing as complete education. We are always going to school, and success consists in striving eternally, but never arriving.

The price of life is effort; the acme of effort is accomplishment; the reward of accomplishment is joy.

Fair riches come to him who strives in ways of golden gain. And fame enshrines his name who works with genius-glowing brain; But greater glory waits for him who, in the bloodless strife 'Gainst self and wrong, adopts, in love, the sacrificial life;