persistence Quotes

“What if the only thing standing in the way of your greatness was that you just had to go after everything obsessively, persistently, and as though your life depended on it?”

“until you become completely obsessed with your mission, no one will take you seriously. Until the world understands that you’re not going away—that you are 100 percent committed and have complete and utter conviction and will persist in pursuing your project—you will not get the attention you need and the support you want.”

“If you knew there was somebody out here afoot that had two million dollars of your money, at what point would you quit lookin for em? That’s right. There ain’t no such a point. ”

“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.”

“My work was practice, practice, practice.”

“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

“A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves.”

“Every man in the boat had absolute confidence in every one of his mates... Why they won cannot be attributed to individuals, not even to stroke Dun Hume. Heartfelt cooperation all spring was responsible for the victory.”

“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”

“Sometimes we need all the glue we can get, just to hold ourselves together.”

“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

“The African-Americans will not advance far if they continue to waste their energy abusing those who misdirect and exploit them. The exploiters of the race are not so much at fault as the race itself. If African-Americans persist in permitting themselves to be handled in this fashion they will always find some one at hand to impose upon them. The matter is one which rests largely with the African-Americans themselves. The race will free itself from exploiters just as soon as it decides to do so. No one else can accomplish this task for the race. It must plan and do for itself.”

“...as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.”

“I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

“It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things.”

“When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.”

“Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it’s related to staying true to our commitments even when we’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.”

“Always stick to the story. It was when you started backtracking that people got in trouble. Interrogation 101.”

“As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.”

“Don’t ever give up, because little by little you are changing.”

“The devil will give up when he sees that you are not going to give in.”

“There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself—that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food.”

There’s a lesson in real-life stalking cases that young women can benefit from learning: persistence only proves persistence—it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn’t mean you are special—it means he is troubled.

Knock and it shall be opened.′ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

“It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life—that’s persistence.”

“What you resist will persist; what you befriend, you will transcend.”

“I’m always looking for you.”

“If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life’s crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.”

″ She is not ‘nagging,’ she’s trying to tell you something; the only reason she is being so persistent is because she cares. When she stops ‘nagging’ as you call it, you should be worried because at that point... she no longer cares.”

“They really screwed me up.”

“Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem when all the odds were against him. Determination and persistence pulsate through your bloodline.”

“God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!”

“At the foot of this hill was the place where a log was laid across the creek. ‘Now comes the trial,’ said Phoenix. Putting her right foot out, she mounted the log and shut her eyes. Lifting her skirt, leveling her cane fiercely before her like a festival figure in some parade, she began to march across. Then she opened her eyes and she was safe on the other side.

″‘Glad this not the season for bulls,’ she said, looking sideways, ‘and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter. A pleasure I don’t see no two-headed snake coming around that tree, where it come once. It took a while to get by him, back in the summer.‘”

″‘Throat never heals, does it?’ said the nurse speaking in a loud, sure voice to Old Phoenix […] ‘Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?—January—two—three years ago—‘”

“No, missy, he not dead, he just the same. Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around, and I go on another trip for the soothing-medicine.”

“She lifted her free hand, gave a little nod, turned around, and walked out of the doctor’s office. Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down.”

“She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air that seemed meditative, like the chirping of a solitary little bird.”

“He suffer and it don’t seem to put him back at all.”

“God wants us to be persistent in our praying. Don’t forget to spend some quiet time praying to your Heavenly Father today.”

“Although she was a widow (her husband had died only the preceding summer), Mrs. Frisby was able, through luck and hard work, to keep her family—there were four of them—happy and well fed.”

“When a bear is smart, when a bear is clever, he never gives up. And I won’t ever!”

″‘You can’t be Peter Pan,’ whispered Natalie. ‘He isn’t black.’ But Grace kept her hand up.”

“It’s a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.”