Quotes About Patience

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles].

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

You know how to pray, don't you? Just put your hands together and hope.

The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not…what do they call it…go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. THEN go postal. But with precision.

It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger's nerve'd crack and he'd give himself up.

The second mouse gets the cheese!

For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

Welcome to the world," he said wearily. "You get used to it after a while.

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

When all else failed, she tried being reasonable.

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

I'm not bloody well going to have it, understand? Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth. Oook, the Librarian pointed out, patiently. What? Oh. Sorry. Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue out of it because a man angry enough to lift 300 pounds of orangutan without noticing is a man with too much on his mind.

People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but expect dinner to turn up within the hour.

A bad hunter chases, a good hunter waits.

Granny Weatherwax always held that you ought to count up to ten before losing your temper. No one knew why, because the only effect of this was to build up the pressure and make the ensuing explosion a whole lot worse.

Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom .

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.

It is in the nature of the universe that the person who always keeps you waiting ten minutes will, on the day you are ten minutes tardy, have been ready ten minutes early and will make a point of not mentioning this.

Against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain.

The only way to get something to turn up when you need it is to need it to turn up.

I shall fear not. According to the Testament of Mezerek, the fisherman Nonpo spent four days in the belly of a giant fish, said Constable Visit. The thunder seemed particularly loud in the silence. Washpot, are we talking miracles here? said Reg eventually. Or just a very slow digestive process?

Anything could make Wentworth sticky. Washed and dried and left in the middle of a clean floor for five minutes, Wentworth would be sticky. It didn't seem to come from anywhere. He just got sticky.

Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought: This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?' And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing's patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.