Quotes About Perseverance

Diligence is the mother of good luck 

slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth.

The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn't been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.

It is a joy for me to have a son who has inherited the main traits of my personality: the ability to rise above mere existence by sacrificing one's self through the years for an impersonal goal.

Walter J. Boyne

And man is capable of standing superhuman suffering if only he feels sure that there is some point and purpose to it, while much less pain will seem intolerable of devoid of meaning.

I am impassioned for independence; I sacrifice all for it … and am tortured more by all the smallest strings than others are by chains.—XXI, 88.

Our faith was a flickering flame.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

Trustin' a woman is like walkin' in California," Coydog would say. "You know there's bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin' anyways. What else could you do?

Ain't no shame in bein' a grocer but it's bitch and a half if they think that that's all you're good for.

You can't fight with death, all you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don't fall out from under you.

The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble is all he's got so that's what he has to work with.

I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they're worth a damn they're bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls'em down.

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

Yeah. If you've never been knocked down, then you've never been in a fight.

I wore death on my shoulder like a superheroes cape, but that didn't matter. I was going to fight the good fight and, win or lose, I'd be counted as a man who struggled against his own fate.

Black men of our day were never told , the skies the limit. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin.

Though assailed by hopelessness I was not afraid.

Every time he slammed his body against the wire fence the jay started as if he were about to fly off, but he didn't. He just kept staring down into those deadly jaws, mesmerized by the spectacle there.

You know love is true when it survives the devastation it causes.

Jackson couldn't fly straight down if you threw him off a cliff.

Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly—but most of all, Clark Heinemann.

dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they're worth a damn they're bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls'em down.