Quotes About Persistence

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.

Un mandarín estaba enamorado de una cortesana. «Seré tuya», dijo ella, «cuando hayas pasado cien noches esperándome sentado sobre un banco, en mi jardín, bajo mi ventana». Pero, en la nonagesimonovena noche, el mandarín se levanta, toma su banco bajo el brazo y se va.

I always behave--I insist upon behaving, whatever I am told and whatever my own discouragements may be, as if love someday might be fulfilled, as if the Sovereign Good were possible

and perhaps tomorrow may see the end of these difficulties. Difficulties are just things to overcome after all."44

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

answers. I took another swig of water, screwed the cap back on and thought about the next place I must look for Doc. I did not like it

The world is glutted with magnificent three-page starts, and the road to hell is paved with unfinished manuscripts.

In waiting for the glorious moment of that first book contract, writers must have giant reservoirs of patience. Yet they must persevere because they don't know the destiny that is being worked out for them. They creep humbly along the ground, without the spacious aerial vision of their lives that would show them the destiny in store for them.

He had a great general's ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. "You can abuse me, you can strike me," Rockefeller said, "so long as you let me have my own way.

Rockefeller seemed destined to succeed as much from his fastidious work habits as from innate intelligence.

He knew that his actions would at first be resisted and misunderstood by the myopic crowd, but he believed that the force and truth of his ideas would triumph in the end.

He constantly reminded his son that it was easier to launch a charitable commitment than to end it.

Another explanation is that while he was persistent, he was also extremely slow; as at school, some people thought him a rather dim-witted dolt who would never rise in the world, and he had to prove himself to naysayers.

Perhaps if Rockefeller had made himself available at the beginning of his career as he now did at the end, he might not have been sitting in the witness stand.

However, he was persistent, which pleased or displeased people according to taste.

Had he known what lay ahead, it seems doubtful that he would have persevered.

He was not a man to abandon a project that had received his blessing.

Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.

He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math.

and awaited instructions.

As part of this studious approach, he recorded all his golf scores in thick little books, with names, dates, and places included.