It is hard work to be good ...

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother\'s lips to kiss you.
It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.
 Ouida

More phrases

Being self-made is a state of mind, and once you put that mentality to work, your success will come.
 Dave East
A lot of people change for good. Some people just fall off. Just trying to progress in anything, no matter what you're doing, I feel like any progression you make... some people aren't gonna be around you that were around you.
 Dave East
We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.
 John Shelby Spong
I've always had the mentality of: work hard, get to bed early, focus - and let your work speak for itself.
 Olivia Palermo
If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

Quotes from the same author

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.
It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nature I believe in. True art aims to, represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal--partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.