Quotes About Persistence

We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

Dying is, to coin a phrase, the last thing your body wants to do.

Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history." We

life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on.

If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - and here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much.

When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world.

All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week.

Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him.

a taxing slog for an old puffed-out flubba-wubba like me, but worth it for the view, which was sensational—like being on top of the world.

And running—serious, dogged, long-distance running—is the one thing we do superlatively well.

to wipe his brow and look sourly at his immediate future.

properispomenon.

don't become paralyzed, and they do indeed sometimes

Let her work for it.

My questioner is not the least bit deterred by the insults I've hurled. He is undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that his questions have now firmly found their place under my skin. He is looking at his notes again, at his flowchart of questions and follow-ups, while I try to calm myself.

You learn to live with the paradox. Meanwhile, you keep looking for chances to push the limits back, to do as much as you can as many as you can, every day. Even on the bad days, there's something good you can do.

Decide that you want it more than you're afraid of it

Well, I went for a ride but I didn't find my car

Leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a process, not an outcome. (quoting John Donahoe)

It takes endurance to get on your knees and stay there until God supernaturally ignites a fresh thought in your mind.

Later, after Rule became famous, she stopped writing those kind of books and started writing about a different kind of true-crime case. She started writing about real-life gothic soap operas, dream-come-true husbands who turn out to have a dark past and crap. I don't have any interest in those crimes or those books, which I think are written for women, and I haven't been able to read anything she's written in 25 years, although I keep trying.

When opportunity knocks all some people can do is complain about the noise.