Quotes About Determination

Non tamen Euryali, non ille oblitus amorum; nam sese opposuit Salio per lubrica surgens; ille autem spissa iacuit revolutus harena.

caput acris equi;

flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move hell.

Yield thou not to adversity, but press on more bravely.

Incepto Ne Desistam!

Quienes pueden, pueden porque piensan que pueden.

If I cannot prevail upon heaven, I will stir up hell!

Fear no more, says the heart...

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

Must, must, must — detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, Now I am rid of all that, find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to head together, to summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.

And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense.

Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. 'That's your course, world,' one says, 'mine is this.

I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care.

Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: But this is what I see; this is what I see, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal making for the shadow.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.

And when the elderly man refused to listen and mumbled on, an odd image came to his mind of a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of lost birds, who were dashed senseless, by the gale, against the glass. He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the glass.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference,that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning.

Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself.

to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.