Quotes About Patience

I stay in line if everybody is standing politely in line, but if people begin to surge toward the ticket window I am alert to be—though never among the first—not among the last.

This is God's self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to the end, patient with all our failings however dismaying, but reminding us that a household—a familial environment, holding three (or sometimes four) generations—cannot escape the sins of the oldest generation; they necessarily infect the atmosphere.

time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game.

Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;

He waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

Stupors, however, do not last forever

They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you, the farmer continued in an easier tone, and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things.

the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

I am sorry to shock you, she said. But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years.

It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great. But the long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a thing if they want to succeed in it—not giving way to over-much admiration for the flowers they see growing in other people's borders; which I am afraid has been my case.' He looked into the far distance and paused.

But nobody did come, because nobody does;

He resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life.

Reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease, and expectation in its only comfortable form--that of absolute faith--is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of it—seven or six years—where may we all be by that time?" "They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past—much less than to look forward to now.

Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.

Time enough to cry when you know 'tis a crying matter; 'tis bad to meet troubles half-way.

a true narrative like time and tide must run its course and would respect no man.

The man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say See! to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply Here! to a body's cry of Where? till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.

Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigor, she always allowed her interlocutors to finish their statements before rejoining with hers.

Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her purposes were broken off. She was not a woman who could hope on without good materials for the process, differing thus from the less far-sighted and energetic, though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope goes on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food and shelter are sufficient to wind up; and perceiving clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one, she accepted her position, and waited coldly for the end.

The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as a mill. He had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line—less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.