Quotes About Perseverance

All of the valuable writing I have done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room.

Walt Whitman, who ardently followed the Overland Campaign: "When did [Grant] ever turn back? He was not that sort; he could no more turn back than time! . . . Grant was one of the inevitables; he always arrived; he was invincible as a law: he never bragged—often seemed about to be defeated when he was in fact on the eve of a tremendous victory

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.

The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden tables. Washington typically kept a small office off to the side. During busy periods, the aides sometimes wrote and copied one hundred letters per day, an exhausting grind

Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity: The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested to execute his purpose, if possible…. In common life, to retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty…. To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.

D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one's resolve in the face of enemies.

The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total.

To survive, he continued to hawk firewood on the St. Louis streets and the time thus spent destroyed any chance of prospering as a farmer: "I regard every load of wood taken, when the services of both myself and team are required on the farm, is a direct loss of more than the value of the load."114

In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently.

I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Hamilton's life was so tumultuous that only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.

May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?

Sheridan had a pugnacity that refused to quit, and Sherman described him as "a persevering terrier dog, honest, modest, plucky and smart enough." Quite unlike Grant

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

The uproar didn't weaken Rockefeller's resolve, yet for all his bravado the boycott exacted a grave toll on his operations.

When rebuffed by a bank officer for a loan, he shot back in anger, "Some day I'll be the richest man in the world.

My brave fellows," he said, "you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected. But your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear . . . If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.

Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

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.

the illness left one leg shorter than the other.

Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith.

He believed there was a time to think and then a time to act. He brooded over problems and quietly matured plans over extended periods. Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith. Unfortunately, once in that state of mind, he was all but deaf to criticism. He was like a projectile that, once launched, could never be stopped, never recalled, never diverted.

Thomas Jones, a Loyalist judge in New York, wrote that not "a stick of wood, a spear of grass or a kernel of corn could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it.