Effort Quote by Albert Einstein

“Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is…

— Albert Einstein

The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty,…

— Albert Einstein

Ever since childhood I have scorned the commonplace limits so often set upon human ambition. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these…

— Albert Einstein

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The…

— Albert Einstein

“Despise everything that useless toil creates as an ornament and an object of beauty. And reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of…

— Seneca

“Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.

— Eric Hoffer

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort…

— Joan Didion

Chivalry is the most delicate form of contempt.

— Albert Guerard

“While this book makes a similar if more modest claim for the social significance of its own fundamentally ambivalent “sentiments of disenchantment” (an ambivalence…

— Sianne Ngai

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

— Edward Gibbon