Quotes About Perseverance

No wonder I have been so slow, I thought. All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.

How do you bear it?" he said. My eyes gave off a faint light, and by it I could see his face, It was a surprise to realise that he was waiting for an answer. I believed I had one. I thought of another dim room, with another prisoner. He had been a craftsman also. On the foundation of his knowledge, civilisation had been built. Prometheus' words deep-running as roots, had waited in me all this time. "We bear it as best we can," I said.

Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him to stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore.

Daedalus had said to me once: Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

whatever tears might have been in me for that lost dream had been parched away.

I forget about the god, why I have fallen, why my feet stick in the same crevices I have already climbed. Perhaps this is all I do, I think, demented -- climb walls and fall from them. And this time when I look up, the god is not smiling.

I believed that she would rather set the world on fire than lose.

Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? [...] For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships—our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees.

I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unravelling them again at night, making nothing.

A moment passed, and then I felt her hand on my back. You will be all right, she said. I have done it, and look, I live.

No wonder I had been so slow, I thought. All this while I had been a weaver without wool, a ship without sea. Yet look where I sail.

He is lost in Agamemnon and Odysseus' wily double meanings, their lies and games of power. They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

Même le meilleur des fers devient cassant à force d'avoir été trop battu.

That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.

Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They're disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their head. And you can't reverse the process.

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids.