Quotes About Perseverance

Too much happens…. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything…. That's what's so terrible.

They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

I decline to accept the end of man.

The prizes go to those who meet emergencies successfully. And the way to meet emergencies is to do each daily task the best we can.

Temporary success can be achieved in spite of lack of other fundamental qualities, but no advancements can be maintained without hard work.

Back of ninety-nine out of one-hundred assertions that a thing cannot be done is nothing, but the unwillingness to do it.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go

You have to hate how the world goes on.

I continued to doubt. But I was not afraid. I just didn't want this to end.

...the curious hunter-up of rare quotations... the young and struggling scribbler...

Never permit failure to become a habit.

I strongly believe that we are not put on this Earth just to accumulate victories and trophies and avoid failures; but rather to be whittled and sandpapered down until what's left is who we truly are

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time.

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.

I've been through hell and just barely got scorched.

Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through tough times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls. Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle, sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing, sweetening of the fibres of character,—but she always pays.

Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. If you are sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends, or of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose.

All the athletic exercises in the world are no power to the individual unless he compel those bars and dumbbells to yield to him and strengthen muscle; the power for which he himself pays in effort.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.