Quotes About Patience

Perseverance is surer than swiftness.

It is in vain to expect our prayers to be heard.

The Tortoise never for a moment stopped, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to the end of the course.

Slow and steady wins the race! From The Tortoise and the Hare.

All night I keep the heart shut I am waiting for a greater madness To declare myself

Pain is imperative. Therefore, endure your suffering silently.

Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing.

In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.

Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: You won't be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.

The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

It might be a Proustian slogan: n'allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.

An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

The issue of how to cede to seduction is tortuous: too soon and one may appear unworthy, too slow and one may lose the interest of the partner.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.

He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.