1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“Only the impossible is worth the effort.”
The Powerbook (2000)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Jeanette Winterson 187
English writer 1959Related quotes
“The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.”
“A Kind of Artistry” p. 175 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1962)
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
“Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.”
The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)
“The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.”
Source: The Phantom Tollbooth
A Great Experiment (1941), p. 189
Context: The truth is, I was never a very good Party man. Probably but for the War of 1914, I should have gone on fairly comfortably as a Conservative official. But those four years burnt into me the insufferable conditions of international relations which made war the acknowledged method — indeed, the only fully authorized method — of settling international disputes. Thenceforth, the effort to abolish war seemed to me, and still seems to me, the only political object worth while.
“Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.”
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.”
Source: The Light Fantastic
“Superhuman effort isn't worth a damn unless it achieves results.”
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense