Quotes About Patience

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza; or, better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

He thought everything out carefully before acting; and therefore remained a bachelor all his life long.

Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws . . .

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.

we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves

Rather large crowd, I whispered to my employer. I thought he had no family. The fact that he had no family is why the crowd is so large, Barker explained patiently. It means that the entire community becomes his family. Also, the Jews have great respect for the teachers of their children.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

I live in a hole here but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere.

Time is the mercy of eternity.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

Whoever enters the Way without a guide will take a hundred years to travel a two-day journey. . . . – Rumi (p. 123)

Death will be late to bring us aid

I asked him, What do you do? He smiled patiently, The typical American question. In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or, What are you doing now? What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation.

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless.

Some people stay longer in an hour than others do in a month.

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future — to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?