Quotes About Persistence

When you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say 'It can't be done.

work hard, live hard, die hard, and go to hell after all, would be hard indeed!

Every invention, every innovation in the history of the world, has been laughed at. Columbus was renounced as a faker; Morse was called a crank; Franklin a fool; Charles Darwin ridiculed for years. It seems to be the fate of every man or woman who discovers a new fact, to be made the subject of attacks of the most violent nature, without rhyme or reason.

Richard Hough

A man could get used to anything if he had to.

He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.

Accordingly, Mr. Cook spent four years, six months, two days, $5,228.20, six thousand yards of wiring, three hundred and two radio tubes, a generator, reams of paper, dizzying mentation and the good will of his wife in assembling his duplication machine.

No amount of reasonable threats prevailed.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Don't worry if your job is small and your rewards are few. Even the mighty Ironwood was once a nut, like you.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.

A body can take two weeks of anything.

The morning overstays its welcome long before noon.

It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child's question was the start of all things.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

viruses never go away, they only hide

was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

It took Drake more than a year to find someone to drill his well. One salt-well driller after another refused him or failed to appear when promised. His standards were high.

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

Across the next two years, they drilled one disappointing hole after another.