Quotes About Perseverance

In uncertainty there's still hope.

Wait and hope for!

your fortune looks like the pyramids. When someone would want to tear them, he wouldn't dare to, and when he dares to, he couldn't do it.

Oh, difficulties do not affright me, said D'Artagnan. I shrink before nothing but impossibilities.

I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.

Bring it on, bring the pain on, I want to face it

Special things have a way of surviving.

You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It's rather like breathing. We don't have to remind ourselves to breathe.

People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it.

I am glad you are pleased, said Mma Ramotswe. You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential. Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.

Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. 'You need to remember that every time you win.

There are many sick vehicles here, and I cannot leave them. They are not dying, said Mma Makutsi firmly. They will still be here when we come back.

Of course you could not allow yourself to think too much about these issues. One had to get on and to attend to the day-to-day business of living.

We are the ones who first ploughed the earth when Modise (God) made it," ran an old Setswana poem. "We were the ones who made the food. We are the ones who look after the men when they are little boys, when they are young men, and when they are old and about to die. We are always there. But we are just women, and nobody sees us.

She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

It is very difficult sometimes to keep upright.

We think that we can fix our lives by taking some simple step, but it's not like that. Most problems need lots of sticking plasters. They need coaxing and massaging and looking at from all sorts of different angles.

The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.

The important thing is to carry on doing what you're doing,' she said. 'And not to do what you think other people think you should do. You should do what you do as well as you possibly can.

The world was not perfect -- it never had been and never would be; it was full of pitfalls and problems, of fear, of regrets, and of bitter tears. Here and there, though, there were tiny points of light, hard to see at times, but there nonetheless, like the welcoming lights of home in the darkness. The flames that made these lights were hard to ignite, but occasionally, very occasionally, we found that we had in our hands the match that could be struck to start one of these fires. p. 197

Alexander McCall Smith

She liked such stories because it helped people to believe in justice, which we had to believe in if we were not simply to give up in the face of adversity.

He felt weary. Life was a battle against wear; the wear of machinery and the wear of the soul. Oil. Grease. Wear.