Quotes About Grit

How sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

A woman is like a tea bag: you never know her strength until you drop her in hot water.

Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.

I'm not hard, I'm frightfully soft. But I will not be hounded.

Character is that which can do without success.

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

If you're a champion, you have to have it in your heart.

Boys, this is only game. But it's like life in that you will be dealt some bad hands. Take each hand, good or bad, and don't whine and complain, but play it out. If you're men enough to do that, God will help and you will come out well.

The only failure which lacks dignity is the failure to try.

Most men fail, not through lack of education, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

Three failures denotes uncommon strength. A weakling had not enough grit to fail thrice.

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart.

Soul of fibre and heart of oak.

Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date.

I try to make it look easy, but the behind-the-scenes stuff is the challenge.

I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.

Repeating, trying to repeat success - it never gets easier.

Rejection just motivates me to keep trying and to try to do better.

I had tuberculosis in my mid-20s. I didn't have much work, was living in a damp London basement in a sleeping bag, and ate only every other day. I looked rough and felt very run down.

I didn't know Penn was an Ivy League school - I didn't know what the Ivy League was. When I got in, they sent me the package, and the tuition was my mother's salary for a year. My mom said, 'We can't afford it.' So I went to the library and found several scholarships and grants and was able to cover 90 percent of my education that way.

I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood. And I've discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

I've never met a successful person in any walk of life - from Michael Dell to Peyton Manning to Barack Obama - that when you ask that person, 'Hey, how did you get here, and what was your road like?' They say, 'You know what? It was really easy. I slept in all the time, turned my papers in late, didn't pay attention to people and my surroundings.'

I'm really happy for Sam Vokes. He doesn't always start, but he always turns up and works so hard.

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.