the hope of results

Do not depend on the hope of results. 

… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless 

and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. 

As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results
 but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. 

~ Thomas Merton

in a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966, 

reproduced in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton

art by Winslow Homer