Quotes About Perseverance

Courage is not something you have, like a sum of money, more or less in a pouch—it cannot be lost, like money spilling out. Courage is inherent in all creatures; it is the quality that keeps them alive, because they endure. It is courage, Paksenarrion, that splits the acorn and sends the rootlet down into soil to search for sustenance. You can damage the creature, yes, and it may die of it, but as long as it lives and endures, each living part has as much courage as it can hold.

The test of a sword is not its polish but its temper

And however your life goes, Paksenarrion, it cannot return to past times: you will never be just as you were. What has hurt you will leave scars. But as a tree that is hacked and torn, if it lives, will be the same tree - will be an oak if an oak it was before - so you are still Paksenarrion. All your past is within you, good and bad alike.

I hope I number patience among my virtues, but shilly-shallying, when nothing is to be gained by delay, is not a virtue.

I may say, without undue egotism, that when I make up my mind to do something, it is done quickly.

I have always been of the opinion that your successes are due not so much to your medical skill as your dogged determination. No one would have the audacity to die when you are doctoring them.

I lost Davey twice, retrieving him on the second occasion from the interior of a huge granite sarcophagus. I was tempted to leave him there, for a while, since he could not get out of it. But Emerson wouldn't let me.

hope I number patience among my virtues, but shilly-shallying, when nothing is to be gained by delay, is not a virtue.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to something better.

Sternly she tried to frown the unseemly sensation down. Burgeon, indeed. She had heard of dried staffs, pieces of mere dead wood, suddenly putting forth fresh leaves, but only in legend. She was not in legend. She knew perfectly what was due to herself. Dignity demanded that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age; and yet there it was--the feeling that presently, that at any moment now, she might crop out all green.

Rose's own experience was that goodness, the state of being good, was only reached with difficulty and pain. It took a long time to get to it; in fact one never did get to it, or, if for a flashing instant one did, it was only for a flashing instant. Desperate perseverance was needed to struggle along its path, and all the way was dotted with doubts.

This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.

I loved my mother. I wanted her to smile, to believe that I was doing the right thing. But that wasn't going to happen. So I ducked my head and kept on going.

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale—they live in today's reality. *

If ever there was a time to fight, this was it.

Sometimes it pays to fight back, even when everyone says it would be better to give up.

And early on I learned that no one gives you anything for free. If you really care about something, if you really want something, you have to fight for it.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.

Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you're being lifted you don't worry about plummeting.