Quotes About Endurance

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation….Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.

It's a funny thing how everyone wants to go to the bottom of the world.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day's work an achievement for eternity.

Perhaps effort doesn't matter, it isn't what ensures survival.

The strong don't necessarily survive, but the mean invariably do.

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.

We would never learn to be patient if there were only joy in the world.

What is it like?

Hopeful kept close to him,

Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff. I weighed the little twiggy sphere in my hand. Hardly there at all.

I must not look the hawk in the eye. I must not punish the hawk, though it bates, and beats, and my hand is raw with pecks and my face stings from the blows of its bating wings. Hawks cannot be punished. They would die rather than submit. Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer. It is an ordeal. I shall triumph.

If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic.

I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR

I told her that magic spells only work until the person under the spell is really and honestly tired of it. It ends when continuing becomes simply too ghastly a prospect.

Her heart's breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.

School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.

He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he'd get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he'd just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts.

What would I do in such a place? Die, I expect.

A man snatches the first kiss, pleads for the second, demands the third, takes the fourth, accepts the fifth — and endures all the rest.

having grown up with the mantra of, 'if you're cold, put another jumper on until your arms can no longer touch your sides',

Those who are certain of the outcome can afford to wait, and wait without anxiety.