Quotes About Persistence

book, banging in the full stops until it looked as if he would break his pen.

If you can watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools, or make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss, you'll be a man.

Most of the advice was along the lines of, "If you persevere in your efforts you will surely succeed," which is bullshit, if you ask me. People who turn to stuff like this have probably already persevered and gotten nowhere.

The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.

Ce n'est pas le chemin qui est difficile, c'est le difficile qui est le chemin.

It isn't at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin. What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.

Y ahora, un poco de paciencia, sin apremios: me la han destinado y algún día me pertenecerá.

For it is great to give up one's wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.

What is it to be God's elect? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age.

joy and refreshment in contemplating the great men who have found that precious stone for which they sell all, even their lives... proceeding on their chosen course without vacillating...absorbed in themselves and in working towards their higher goal.

Tap for all del ikke lysten til å gå: jeg går meg til det daglige velbefinnende hver dag og går fra enhver sykdom; jeg har gått meg til mine beste tanker og jeg kjenner ingen tanke så tung at man ikke kan gå fra den.

Look, Grover Cleveland," one of them finally snapped at me after my third approach. "Harmoniums and water wings, diavolos and pungs we got, but Victorian easy chairs—nyet. And now, excuse me, will you? I have another nudnick here wants a round table like King Arthur's.

the only one of them not to fall on their ass

Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.

I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.

proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.

If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.

What can't be cured must be endured.

his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him;

which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat.

Su vida había sido una sucesión de actos de voluntad, pero a veces flaqueaba y se hundía

So it's you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.

Any new idea is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: What kind of an idea are you? Are you the kind the compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society? Aims to find a niche to survive? Or are you the cursed, bloody-minded ram rod type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind, that almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred , be smashed to bits, but the hundredth time will change the world?

Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.