Quotes About Persistence

As I didn't belong from a filmy background, I didn't know how to become an actor.

Acting was the only place that I ever felt like I belonged so went for it with everything I had.

I lived below the poverty line when I was young and starting out as a writer. But my wife and I kept trying to do things better, as anyone with ambition does. But just because you're trying doesn't mean you're always going to succeed.

When you want the belt, you have to work for it.

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.

But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.

Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.

Everett was strange," Sleight concedes. "Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.

I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.

Because it is there

Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams," he penned to a girl named Vanessa. "Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming." Doug

My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out.

Following Sikhdar's discovery in 1852, it would require the lives of twenty-four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained.

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have.

Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams...Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming. -Doug Hansen

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won't even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.

Reform is slow work, and it is for neither the fainthearted nor the impatient.

Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.

tag from Virgil: "Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis." The line means "Carry on, and preserve yourselves for better times."59

The work of combatting broadly held views like those of the Klansmen of the 1920s is almost never easy or quick. It requires years of persistent witness and of standing firm in protest when it would be more convenient to give in and move on.

Unless he convinced himself that no great life was without its mishaps and its mistakes, he would not be able to return to the arena.

the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.

I had to remind myself that it's good for journalists to feel demeaned. It means we're onto a story.