Quotes About Perseverance

nothing is more difficult in war than to adhere to a single strategic plan" and to resist the "constant temptation to desert the chosen line of action in favor of another one.

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

In a note to a West Point classmate, Eisenhower wrote, "There is no use denying that at times discouragement has piled on top of discouragement.

To make it perfectly clear to you: suppose you lose a hand or an ear is shot off, or perhaps a piece of your nose, and you think you should go back to get first aid. If I see you, it will be the last goddamn walk you'll ever take.

double-crostic.

There was nothing for it but obduracy, to soldier on even for those who were not soldiers. "How hard I have become," an American Red Cross volunteer told her diary in February. "Emotions which formerly would have wracked my soul leave me almost untouched. It's a hardness of survival.

Lincoln had inelegantly called "the tired spot that can't be got at.

Ernie Pyle, who was with them as usual, wrote: "They were dead weary, as a person could tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies spoke their inhuman exhaustion…. They were young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion made them look middle-aged." A sergeant wrote to his family in Iowa: "It'll soon be five months that a pup tent has been our home. Five months since I've even so much as sat at a table while eating.

Rick Atkinson

Eisenhower wrote his own son at West Point: "I have observed very frequently that it is not the man who is so brilliant [who] delivers in time of stress and strain, but rather the man who can keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job.

Things are always confusing and mysterious in war," Pyle wrote. "I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys.

I want to fight the champ," he said. "If you lose, you've lost to the champ and it's no disgrace. If you win, you're the new champ.

Mount up and continue," Patton told his armor crews. "Don't stop except for gas." Omar

Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind the Hürtgen battle plan. "All we could do was sit back and pray to God that nothing would happen," General Thorson, the operations officer, later lamented. "It was a horrible business, the forest.… We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn't turn loose.

The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

If you can't strive for perfection...just strive.

You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time.

Slater used to be a poet, he's nothing now, and he sort of looks on Robby and me with awe because we aren't nothing yet, we haven't given up yet, awed at me because I'm thirty-one and haven't given up yet, and at Robby because he's young and has potential. Most people stop wanting to be a writer around the age of sixteen.

You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don't.

and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown.

Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it's just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working.

Dodging potholes so old and deep that the devil must use them as a shortcut home...