Quotes About Persistence

There are many things in life worth getting temporarily tired for, but there is nothing in life worth getting permanently tired for.

Everyone is a loser. Winners are just losers with more patience.

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.

Better never begin than never make an end.

Light burdens, long borne, grow heavy.

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to.

Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage.

It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.

We're going to have to fight to win. The logic of procrastination has been destroyed. A people can never be so repressed that they can't strike back in some way. We will purge the poltroons and fight. Or just ignore them.

At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.

If you study calligraphy, you will find that those who are not so clever usually become the best calligraphers. Those who are very clever with their hands often encounter great difficulty after they have reached a certain stage. This is also true in art, and in life." The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.

But recognition is often unsatisfying and fame is like sea-water for the thirsty. Love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and good drink.

The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.

Where in our upbringing, our schooling, our career are we explicitly taught to value, to enjoy, even to love the plateau, the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress?

The people we know as masters don't devote themselves to their particular skill just to get better at it. The truth is, they love to practice—and because of this they do get better.

Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

What we call "mastery" can be defined as that mysterious process through which what is at first difficult or even impossible becomes easy and pleasurable through diligent, patient, long-term practice.

In the long run, the war against mastery, the path of patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results, is a war that can't be won.

Prizes and medals. Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery.

I loved photography and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, unless you were related to somebody there was no way in.

A lot of people like to do certain things, but they're not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.

You can't set a hen in one morning and have chicken salad for lunch.

The principle part of faith is patience.