Quotes About Persistence

A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves.

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

If you persist in trying To attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift!) If you persist in making effort To obtain what effort cannot get; If you persist in reasoning About what cannot be understood, You will be destroyed By the very thing you seek.

We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by "how we feel." A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success.

effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained.

Let this be the ending of the book but by no means the end of the searching.

The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However

The opposite of sloth is not 'activity' or industriousness in a business sense. It is fortitude - including patience and long-suffering.

I think there are certain unimpeded passages, that this is registering in my brain somewhere where the drugs and the bugs don't reach. There's a core of myself I can feel, a hidden center of my identity that won't be sedated or confused or overcome.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist

Keep it bouncing, he'd told her once, that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.

But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.

Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.

The Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which too often must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down into an unmeasured abyss.

How they persist. The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were Jewish too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see.

They were invading Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down.

It would be hard to find anywhere in history a record of any other country going to such efforts, for so long, in a cause from which it could gain so little and lose so much.

Through a square hall filled with bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp.

cortejar la obstinación e ignorar la inspiración con el fin de que esta última, despechada, se rindiese y librase sus primeras luces.

You can and you must. Go to the man you love and love him in whatever way you can for as long as you can. Love him in whatever way you can.

It's a soft-sounding word, 'never,' but its velvety timbre can't hide its sharp edges...Never pressed down on him. It grabbed him by the neck and shook him. He sucked in a deep breath, sucked in all that never and started to sneeze. Never filled his nose, his eyes, his soaking fur.

When I was little, I asked my mom to help me memorize Matthew 7:7: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.