Quotes About Persistence

Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.

One mantra of Silicon Valley, the technological innovation capital of the world, is "fail faster to succeed sooner.

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.

goals not bathed in prayer or brought in humility before the Lord turn out to be downright useless. They don't go anywhere. They don't accomplish anything.

Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City during the 1930s, used to say, I don't fail often. But when I do, it's a beaut!

Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest. —WILSON MIZNER L

You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.

Never bring a knife to a gun fight, I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off.

Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—

You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.

Our first priority is the same as it ever was," he said: "survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It's the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don't know about you, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with that.

Every achievement worth remembering is stained with the blood of diligence and scarred by the wounds of disappointment

People who soar are those who refuse to sit back and wish things would change.

By the time we made our way through the crowded tables and reached the hotel lobby, the two men were nowhere to be seen. Lucy pressed on to the front entrance, and we followed. On the steps in front of the hotel, we looked across the boulevard to a vast green expanse of trees, shrubs, and lawns. There was still no sign of the two men. We looked up and down the wide pavement, again without seeing either Dietrich or Richter

Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top?

We are what we do. If you want to change, you have to work at it. Change what you do. You have to repeat and reinforce. Over and over. Do the same thing again and again. Until it is you.

When one considers the multitude of unsung of every race, ethnicity, gender, perhaps toiling away in obscurity, their work thrown out after their deaths by philistine relatives and vulgarian landlords, one must weep. And one does.

start. It occurs to me that both in my dreams and in my waking life there exists the same question: What now? Something happens or nothing happens, and either way, I have to decide what to do next. There is no end to it. Well, no, there is one end to it, and that revelation leads me to this conclusion: "What now?" is the definition of life.

Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

Practice is not a trimming on your life. Practice is the foundation. If that's not there nothing else will be there.

The great thing about rejection is that it doesn't matter how many times you get rejected. All that needs to happen is if for one person to tell you 'yes' and then everybody else can go f*** themselves.

If I were a believer in the theory of "rock bottom," this could very well have been it. As it stands, I am not a believer. Rock bottom is for sissies; I've hit rock bottom dozens of times. I've woken up next to a billy goat, for Christ's sake. You don't just give up!

Never run after a man or a bus, there's always another one in five minutes.