Effort Quotes, Sayings
Looking for inspiration and encouragement to begin a task or accomplish your goals? Let these effort quotes be the spark you need to get started.
Sometimes we all need is a little nudge to get us moving in the right direction. These words of wisdom can help you give it your all, no matter what your challenge is.
So find a quote to fuel your fire, whether you’re a student, climbing the ladder at work, or just looking to crush that project you’ve been putting off. You’ll be conquering your goals in no time at all!
10 best effort quotes
Let’s begin with ten of our favorite effort quotes from famous people.
1. Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.
Taylor Swift
2. Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.
Henry Ford
3. Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali
4. Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
Oprah Winfrey
5. Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment.
Mahatma Gandhi
6. I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Thomas Jefferson
7. All things are difficult before they are easy.
Thomas Fuller
8. There is only one thing in life you can control: Your own effort.
Mark Cuban
9. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
Helen Keller
10. There is never a traffic jam created from people going the extra mile.
Jeff Dixon
Popular effort sayings
Here are some colloquial expressions and popular sayings about giving maximum effort and trying hard:
- Give it the old college try.
- Put in your best effort.
- Go all out.
- Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
- Success is no accident.
- Do your best!
- Leave it all on the field.
- Break a leg!
- The harder you work, the luckier you get.
- Burn the midnight oil.
- Never give up!
- The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
Sports effort quotes
1. It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
Babe Ruth
2. Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.
Arnold Palmer
3. Success isn’t something you chase. It’s something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it’ll come when you least expect it.
Michael Jordan
4. Going on one more round, when you don’t think you can, that’s what makes all the difference in your life.
Sylvester Stallone
5. Get maximum effect from minimum effort.
Bruce Lee
6. The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.
Vince Lombardi
7. The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammad Ali
Effort quotes about love and relationships
1. When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.
M. Scott Peck
2. The results you achieve will be in direct proportion to the effort you apply.
Denis Waitley
3. Trying and getting hurt can’t possibly be worse for you than being stuck.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
About friendship
4. To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Effort quotes for kids
1. Give your best effort, because you are worth your best effort.
Denis Waitley
2. Success is a ladder you cannot climb with your hands in your pockets.
Unknown
3. Thinking well is wise; planning well wiser; doing well wisest and best of all.
Persian proverb
4. Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
Robert Collier
5. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
Tim Notke
6. If a task is once begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.
Unknown
For students
7. Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today.
Tim Fargo
8. Just try to be the best you can be; never cease trying to be the best you can be. That’s in your power.
John Wooden
9. Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
Napoleon Hill
10. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Will Durant
11. You may say: ‘For what purpose did I learn all these things?’ But you need not fear that you have wasted your efforts; it was for yourself that you learned them.
Seneca
Short effort quotes for Instagram
1. If you’re not gonna go all the way, why go at all?
Joe Namath
2. Virtue proceeds through effort.
Euripides
3. Winning is not everything, but the effort to win is.
Zig Ziglar
4. Effort is grossly underrated.
Gary Vaynerchuk
5. A winning effort begins with preparation.
Joe Gibbs
6. Doing the little things can make a big difference.
Yogi Berra
7. Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
Benjamin Franklin
8. Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
José Ortega y Gasset
9. Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcome.
Epictetus
Funny effort sayings
10. No bees, no honey, no work, no money.
Unknown
11. The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen.
Sarah Brown
12. A man of words, and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds.
English proverb
13. The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
Vidal Sassoon
14. About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.
Gloria Pitzer
15. The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph!
Marvin Phillip
16. Don’t expect front row seats if you’re giving nosebleed effort.
Eric Thomas
17. People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach.
Marguerite de Navarre
Inspirational effort quotes
1. Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Napoleon Hill
2. Personal development is the belief that you are worth the effort, time, and energy needed to develop yourself.
Denis Waitley
3. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4. Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.
Chuck Palahniuk
5. Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.
Elbert Hubbard
6. Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking our potential.
Winston Churchill
7. The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.
Vera Nazarian
Effort quotes for work
1. Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
Vince Lombardi
2. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
3. Hope is wishing for a thing to come true. Faith is believing it will come true. Work is making it come true.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale
4. The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.
Antonin Sertillanges
5. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. How much easier our work would be if we put forth as much effort trying to improve the quality of it as most of us do trying to find excuses for not properly attending to it.
George W. Ballenger
7. Whatever you work is, dignify it with your best thought and effort.
Esther Baldwin York
About achievement
8. If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.
Michelangelo
9. It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.
James Cash Penney
10. Talent without effort is wasted talent. And while effort is the one thing you can control in your life, applying that effort intelligently is next on the list.
Mark Cuban
11. Men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.
Lloyd Jones
Effort sayings about life
1. The good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
2. Make each day count by setting specific goals to succeed, then putting forth every effort to exceed your own expectations.
Les Brown
3. There’s no reward without work, no victory without effort, no battle won without risk.
Nora Roberts
4. In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.
James Allen
5. All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.
Chuck Palahniuk
6. Our daily objectives should include an honest effort to improve on yesterday.
Zig Ziglar
7. Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
Samuel Johnson
8. You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.
Albert Camus
9. I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.
Katherine Arden
10. One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.
Albert Einstein
Famous effort quotes
1. Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.
Theodore Roosevelt
2. When I have tried and failed, I shall have failed.
Sophocles
3. It’s no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
Winston Churchill
4. What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
5. Whether our efforts are, or not, favored by life, let us be able to say, when we come near to the great goal, I have done what I could.
Louis Pasteur
6. Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
Theodore Roosevelt
7. We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson
8. So with slight efforts, how should one obtain great results? It is foolish even to desire it.
Euripides
9. Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.
Sandra Day O’Connor
From famous authors
10. If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.
Emily Brontë
11. I never blame failure — there are too many complicated situations in life — but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
13. Man’s capacities have never been measured. Nor are we to judge of what he can do by precedents, so little has been tried.
Henry David Thoreau
We hope these effort quotes and sayings have inspired you to take on and accomplish your goals. For more inspirational quotes, check out these lists:
By Greg Johnson | Published 4/9/24
