The highest excellence is like water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving, the low place which all men dislike.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)

Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no one can live.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you believe that you can damage, then believe that you can fix.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

- David Foster Wallace

You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.

- Arthur Ashe

Some give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.

- Herodotus

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

- Jane Addams

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

- Henry David Thoreau

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

- Peter F. Drucker

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

- John Wesley

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

- Marian Wright Edelman

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

- Vince Lombardi

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

- Thomas Jefferson

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

- Helen Keller

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

- Lin Yutang

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

- Vince Lombardi

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910

- Theodore Roosevelt

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

- Tom Lehrer

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

- George Santayana

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Beyond the mountains there are mountains again.

- Haitian proverb