Quotes About Persistence

I think kids abandon stories all the time. They start stories and get frustrated or get a different, better idea. I think that it is more worthwhile to stick with a story and revise it and try to finish it than abandon ship. Revisions, for any writer, are the name of the game.

In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that if you put in 10,000 hours that you will become an expert, but there aren't any cases where someone has achieved world-class mastery without it! So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor.

I am a Beginner. What the others are I don't really know. All I know is I am wiped out every six months or so. I die. I have died hundreds and hundreds of times. It is always the same death. I do not know what dies. Why must I always begin again and again – always the same high hopes, the identical death?

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!

My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.

If interest promotes effort, effort in turn sustains interest.

Wise men say that time is like a river. I say time is like a river of SHIT... and as you float down that river in your little canoe, your paddles are getting smaller and smaller.

When I was nine, my life was devoted to seeing a tit. I was Captain Ahab, and it was my big white whale. I'd go down to Sears on a Sunday in hopes they'd remove a clothing from a mannequin. Sad but true, sad but fuckin' true.

It is easy to find oneself so wrapped up in the end result that one pays too little attention to the small steps it takes to arrive there.

Spiritual practice is more about questions than answers, more about searching than finding, more about effort than accomplishment.

The world needs many more dreamers. Unreasonable souls who fight the urge to be ordinary.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

The natural urge when running a distance is to push harder and finish sooner - to race against time. Every second behind a deadline is a little defeat.

The only urgency I feel is to keep on, at a slow pace, with my journey.

I don't know all that I'm searching for, but I just have this sense of desperation and urgency within me all the time that I just have to keep going.

The summit is what drives us, but the climb itself is what matters.