Quotes About Persistence

Every year I just kept going back to gymnastics, but I didn't start out training 10 hours a day. When I turned 10 or 11, I got more serious and I focused a lot on making it to the elite level, and from there I just kept going.

When I first decided to open a restaurant, I was turned down by several banks. It was the late 80's and many restaurants were failing. I refused to give up because I knew I had a good concept.

I've always been blessed with confidence. I am a glass-half-full person. My first movie, 'Private Benjamin,' got turned down by every studio until the very last one, but I just kept thinking, 'Why are you people not seeing that this is a hit movie? What is wrong with you?'

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can't stop marching. Even when they're turning the hoses on you, you can't stop.

What's worked for me is not quitting and being passionate about what I do and not giving up - and when I don't believe in myself, turning to others who believe in me.

I usually work on a film soundtrack for two years, turning in a song every few months, and that keeps my creative energy high, because I'm constantly rotating projects. The trick is to make sure I don't work too hard and get exhausted.

An inborn tendency toward science turning it into a lifelong commitment.

For an actor, you're rejected eight or ten times a day. All you've got to sell is yourself. You're not selling products, they're not turning down a car, they're turning you down. Most people can't handle that. Most people are essentially not set up that way.

It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.

From the time I was 16 to really up until turning 21, the roles were really, really few and far between. I had people say that I just wasn't a good singer. They didn't know what to do with me; I would never fit in any markets. I almost quit acting altogether.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It's about turning up the next day and doing it again.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

Turning into a full-fledged comedian involves a lot of hardships.

Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.

I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing.

When I turned 17, I had a bike malfunction at a race, and in my head, I went, 'You know what? I'm done. I'm going to go play drums.' I still ride my bikes for fun, but that was the turning point.

A lot of people think the path to success is a straight line, but it's not. It has got many turns and curves, and you just got to go with the ebbs and flows of it all.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.

I'm really happy for Sam Vokes. He doesn't always start, but he always turns up and works so hard.

The cooperation of NASCAR - or any other system, it turns out - persists only when everyone believes he has the opportunity to win.

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate.

When I started Go Daddy, I tried many things - like building networks and selling education - and none of it panned out. I lost millions of dollars the first couple of years. I made a lot of wrong turns, but that's the process of being successful in business.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.