Go easy. You may have to push forward, but you don’t have to push so hard. Go in gentleness, go in peace. Do not be in so much of a hurry. At no day, no hour, no time are you required to do more than you can do in peace.

It is essential to effort that existence should be hard, painful and uncertain. It is essential that the struggle should endure, for it is by the struggle man develops. If it ceased, and life became perfect — effort would cease; Life would cease.For Life is effort.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make... So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment, when all effort disappears.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith - in life, in other people, and in oneself - is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

The Paradox of Effort: You have to put in more effort to make something look effortless. When you realize this, you start to do things differently

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The Paradox of Effort: You have to put in more effort to make something look effortless. When you realize this, you start to do things differently.

There is no wasted effort. There is no wasted effort. It will all add to the path. It will all add to the journey. Somehow. You just can't even imagine how it will. But you just need to do things fully to the best of your ability. And you go towards the thing that you love. What you love to do.

On meditation:

Make no effort for or against anything.

Whatever happens, happens.

Surrender to yourself in the moment.

Resist nothing and reject nothing, including the urge to resist and reject.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

Effort supposes resistance.

The truth is, you can’t sustainably force life. You must let what is meant to be, unfold. You must do what feels good and makes you come alive. That’s how you thrive.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.