Quotes About Persistence

Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first," Orolo said. "One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of probability waves in a vacuum—" "I.e., see stuff." "Yes, and perform the trick of integrating those givens into seemingly persistent objects that can be held in consciousness.

What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him. "Observing," father would say. "But how long can you observe the same thing?" "Forever.

It's like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies.

But that was one of those errands that, if not achieved in the first twelve hours, would remain undone centuries later.

Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this could be kneaded from place to place but never removed.

THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds.

Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.

Gold is where you find it.

For the stuff of which we are made is just the common stuff of the world, viz. ordinary gross matter, so that a materialist might say, we are no different from rocks; and yet our matter is imbued with some organizing principle that endows us with identities, so that I may send a letter to Daniel Waterhouse in London in the full confidence that, like a smoke-ring traversing a battle-field, he has traveled a great distance, and persisted for a long time, and yet is still the same man.

He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year

The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon, breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipponese Army Water Transport Code 3A, breaking the Greater East Asia Ministry Code) present about as much resistance as successive decks of a worm-eaten wooden frigate.

Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you're going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.

He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.

What you resist, persists. What you look at disappears. That is, it ceases to have its illusory form. You see it for what it Is. And what Is can always be changed. It is only what Is Not that cannot be changed. Therefore, to change the Isness, move into it. Do not resist it. Do not deny it.

This is what is meant by being single-minded. If you choose something, choose it with all your might, with all your heart. Don't be faint-hearted. Keep going! Keep moving toward it. Be determined.

Finally, don't try to "get out" of anything. What you resist, persists. I

There are those who say that to know God you must overcome all earthly passions. Yet to understand and accept them is enough. What you resist persists. What you look at disappears.

But how then can I be truly grateful for something I know is not there? Faith. If you have but the faith of a mustard seed, you shall move mountains. You

They always said on TV you could do anything you wanted, but here I was trying to do something and it wasn't working. I would never be able to do it.

So you're just going to give up? That's the plan.

They always said on TV you could do anything you wanted, but here I was trying to do something and it wasn't working. I would never be able to do it.

Tis not the nodding of the head that rows the boat.' As

No, we don't walk away. But when we're holding on to something precious, we run. We run and run, fast as we can, and we don't stop running until we are out from under the shadow.

Curious fact that those who never fail are also those who never truly succeed.