Quotes About Persistence

He didn't so much get there as just never leave.

Second time's charm," Burned Dan said. "Think that's third time," I told him. "You want to do this again?" he said. "Second time's charm," I repeated.

A second later, a third knife sticks into the doorframe, the two sides of its handle calving off as well, tapping into the hardwood floor one by one, like they tried to hold on, they really did, but… they're just from the dollar store, come on, this is all they could manage.

Or as Luther Burbank put it, "It is repetition, repetition, repetition that habituates the skill.

You must follow the path that opens to you and you must never stop. And it will demand that you shed your skin, over and over and over again. Your skin must be shed for that skin is not the skin of a writer; it is the skin of whatever you were before.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher answer'– but none exists

Howard Taylor wrote of his father, "For forty years the sun never rose on China a single day that God didn't find him on his knees.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:17, we are encouraged to "pray without ceasing." This means never being far from the attitude or action of talking and listening to God. Prayer should be a natural part of our thinking. Not just in our worship but in our work. Not just in our quiet moments but also in our chaos. We pray because He's there. We pray because He's God. We pray because He cares.

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.

Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots

Better to wait actively than passively.

The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.

Fear is your worst enemy in dreams; if you allow it to persist, it will grow stronger and your self confidence as well as your lucidity will grow correspondingly weaker.

What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.

When there's no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.

I searched until I panted for breath, but could not find it. The solid stone structure was nowhere to be seen. The house was gone - and Merlin with it.

Bajo, quizá. Humillado, quizá. Incluso devastado. Pero no destruido. Y nunca, nunca, acabado.

It does not matter where one starts; it is where one finishes that makes all the difference.