Best Effort Quotations

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

The one thing that matters is the effort.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

That's what I try to do each and every week is give my best effort and not give up, no matter what comes at us.

Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.

I realized the only thing I owed my audience was my own judgment and my own best effort.

I do think that despite my best efforts to resist it, I am now a grown-up. It's due to lots of very difficult decisions that you make over a long period of time - about motherhood, wifehood, and work, and all the things that one has to make decisions about.

An excuse becomes an obstacle in your journey to success when it is made in place of your best effort or when it is used as the object of the blame.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.

The results you achieve will be in direct proportion to the effort you apply.

I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

I trust my government. I actually have a trust for my government with my data, and I trust them to protect me. They've protected me - they've made the best efforts to protect me my whole life.

There's never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

You persist in this romantic vision of what it is to be a vampire, but despite my best efforts to curb it I have a taste for blood.

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.

Every time you compete, try harder to improve on your last performance. Give nothing short of your very best effort.

Marsh: Our best efforts were never even a mild annoyance to the Lord Ruler." Kelsier: Ah, but being an annoyance is something that I am very good at. In fact, I'm far more than just a 'mild' annoyance--people tell me I can be downright frustrating. Might as well use this talent for the cause of good, eh?

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

The greatest forces in the world are being used against families and traditional family values. These values are being undermined in subtle and in not-so-subtle ways. Because of this assault on family values, it takes all of your best efforts to fortify your family. It takes hard work and planning. It takes sacrifice. 'In the setting of the family...may I suggest that we give more of ourselves.'

The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society.

I know that so many of us hoped that, by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. But, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

Despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

I realize I had to learn ... to stop chasing the perishable prizes of this earth ... and give my best effort unto God and trust Him with the results.

I had to learn how to give my best effort to God and trust him with the results. I have to learn to have enough faith to trust in his grace and to trust in his sovereign and perfect plan. I had to submit my will, my desires, my dreams — give it all up to God and say, “Look, I am going to give my best effort, go on the court and play every day for you, and I'm going to let you take care of the rest.

Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.

I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.

It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying, we did not give it our best effort

Never be satisfied with less than your very best effort. If you strive for the top and miss, you'll still 'beat the pack.'

We compete, not so much against an opponent, but against ourselves. The real test is this: Did I make my best effort on every play?

Why would you want to keep the bluebird houses mounted in a place that you now know is unsafe for them? Bluebirds are not ornaments for pictures, they are living things that deserve your best effort if you are going to be a landlord to them. There is no magic spell that will protect those bluebirds--they have to depend on you or they are doomed.

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing twice.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Some times your best effort just isn't good enough.

You never help others by allowing them to getaway with giving less than their best efforts.

Every man who praises himself brushes the luster from his best efforts.

Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.

There's no use diversifying into unknown companies just for the sake of diversity. A foolish diversity is the hobgoblin of small investors. That said, it isn't safe to own just one stock, because in spite of your best efforts, the one you choose might be the victim of unforeseen circumstances. In small portfolios, I'd be comfortable owning between three and ten stocks.

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

Science has long been in the values business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to value priinciples of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument.

I think this is the way love feels to people like you and me. Threatening and dangerous. We have to be in control, and love takes that away. People like us… We can't tolerate vulnerability. But despite our best efforts, sooner or later love seems to catch up with us. And then…And then we fall apart.

Let me assure my countrymen of the Southern States that it is my earnest desire to regard and promote their truest interest the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally and to put forth my best efforts in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.

What will people remember us for? Are other people’s lives better because we lived? Did we make a difference? Did we use to the fullest the gifts and abilities God gave us? Did we give our best effort, and did we do it for the right reasons?

Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!

When one's own problems are unsolvable and all best efforts frustrated, it is lifesaving to listen to other people's problems.

Creating in all employees the awareness that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the company's success.

Despite my best efforts I’ve seen you naked before – doesn’t do much for me so no worries.

Salvation is not some felicitous state to which we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps after the contemplation of sufficiently good examples. It is an utterly new creation into which we are brought by our death in Jesus' death and our resurrection in his. It comes not out of our own best efforts, however well-inspired or successfully pursued, but out of the shipwreck of all human efforts whatsoever.

Everyone has their weak spot. The one thing that, despite your best efforts, will always bring you to your knees, regardless of how strong you are otherwise.

I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts.... I've been hung in effigy. I've been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off .

If you ask me how I want to be remembered, it is as a winner... A winner is somebody who gave his best effort, who has tried the hardest they possibly can...who has utilized every ounce of energy and strength within them to accomplish something. It doesn't mean that they accomplished it or failed, it means they've given it their best. That's a winner.

Give your best effort, because you are worth your best effort.

Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence.

The Good Lord in his infinite wisdom, did not create us all equal when it comes to size, strength, appearance, or various aptitudes. But success is not being better than someone else, success is the peace of mind that is a direct result of self-satisfacti on in knowing that you gave your best effort to become the best of which you are capable.

If you make your best effort to be kinder, nurture compassion, make the world a better place, then you can say 'At least I've done my best.

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracles await.

Strive to accomplish the very best you are capable of. Nothing less than your best effort will suffice.

Success is a personal matter - only you as an individual can tell if you did everything within your power to give your best effort

We don’t have to be superstars or win championships…. All we have to do is learn to rise to every occasion, give our best effort, and make those around us better as we do it.

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required - not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.