Quotes About Perseverance

When you still have something in the tank, it's really hard to let it go.

I have always demanded the maximum of myself, but the tank is quite empty. The balance of the hard work I put in day in and day out and the satisfaction I get out of it at the end of the day is no longer there.

I was fresh from college and worked with my mum and even freelanced on my own with her team of people. I was young and had to face all kinds of tantrums from my clients. I was not disheartened.

Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

Believe you and I sing tiny and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.

John Havel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, noted that the "greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God. . .

Be encouraged by the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that "habit overcomes habit.

you should not allow yourself to be convinced by repeated failures,

And this morning, / above us, invisible stars the daylight hides begin to map for us, / secretly, new paths our hearts had seemed to despair of,–those /vapor trails that linger longer than they are supposed to, the wake / of the boat that echoes perhaps endlessly, shore to shore,– if only / we can believe in them without ever seeing where they are. — Richard Jackson, from "Invisible Star Maps," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Oak follows oak, and elm ranks with elm, however many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!

Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!

I've come a long way to get nowhere at all, I thought. And I've spent everything I have to get here.

I can deal with fighting in the arena in Hell, but laundry and dishes put the fear of God in me.

I've got plenty on my plate. Till then, Ishii can piss his sorrows in a teapot and brew himself a hot cup of fuck off.

CANDY AND ALESSA are practicing in the storeroom. One of them is burning through "Miserlou" and the other sounds like she's falling down the stairs with a boxful of cats. But she keeps playing. Good for her.

What I do know is that a famous dead guy once said, "Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed-wire handle.

On the TV, some poor Indian has just died hauling Fitzcarraldo's boat over the mountain. The Indian's friends are gathered around his body, but Fitz is screaming for them to keep pulling his boat. He's the hero of the story and he's completely nuts. This isn't going to have a happy ending.

No one's going to look out for us but us. We're just bugs on God's windshield. You need to get serious and work with me on this or we're both going to end up in Tartarus.

I just lie there like an upside-down turtle trying to right itself.

What's that old Sunday school warning about how if you fight dragons too long, you can become one? That's been spinning around in my head for years, long enough that I know I'd rather be a dragon than a sheep to the slaughter.

Goddamn nature. All it wants to do is hitch a ride, kill you, or sting you. Sometimes all at once.

There's nothing I could have done about it then and there's nothing I can do about it now and that's what I have to live with. Maybe that right there is the definition of life. Being alive is learning how to live with the intolerable.

I hurt like I just climbed out of a cement mixer, and the shot that grazed my side burns like hell. But I don't have time to whine right now.