Quotes About Perseverance

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

An new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

Good will starts out fat and sweet as tub butter and turns slowly rancid. It must be made again daily if we want it fresh.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

You who had not been allowed to finish tenth grade but sent to be a frightened chambermaid, carried home every week armloads of books from the library rummaging them late at night, insomniac, riffling the books like boxes of chocolates searching for the candied cherries, the nuts, hunting for the secrets, the formulae, the knowledge those others learned that made them shine and never ache.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.

Waiting is one of the great arts.

Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.

Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.

Patience is more worthy than miracle-working.

You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

Fall down seven times, get up eight.

boat had swept away most of their catch. Once

Elbow grease" is not a metaphor.

There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what? So what? Go on.

I know that I was often tired or in pain, but you just work through it.

I may not be happy," she said, "but I will be .

Sometimes I wish the end would come... whatever it is

But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.

Failure leads to Success.

Tears may be dried up, but the heart--never.

Fidelity, enforced and unto death, is the price you pay for the kind of love you never want to give up, for someone you want to hold forever, tighter and tighter, whether he's close or far away, someone who becomes dearer to you the more you've sacrificed for his sake.

Can we cut the Zen crap for a moment?" I ask. "I'm trying to beat this bag to a pulp.