Quotes about perseverance

I also think it's important for us to think forward and to imagine future history in a way that is not restrained by our own lifetimes. Oftentimes people say, well, if it takes that long, I'll be dead. So what? Everybody dies, right? And if people who were involved in the struggle against slavery-I'm thinking about people like Frederick Douglass, or Ida B. Wells in the struggle against lynching if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.

[Leonard] gave me the best advice that I was given while I was at the center, which was to hold on. No matter how bad or difficult life becomes, if you hold on, hold on to whatever it is you need to hold on to, be it religion, friends, a support group, a set of steps or your own heart, if you hold on, just hold on, life will get better.

"He would have made a good soldier."

I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

It wasn’t going to be hard—it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I’d done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to.

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

Yakov Shepsovitch, what more can I tell you? Take heart in the truth and endure your trials. Sustain yourself in your innocence. (Bibikov)

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.

"But... but... you can't fight the way things are..." "But we do. Every day. That's what Jedi are." "You can never win-" "We don't have to win. We only have to fight."

Just as "pluck" comes of breeding, so is endurance especially an attribute of the artist. Because he can stand outside himself, and (if there be nothing ignoble in them) take pleasure in his own sufferings, the artist has a huge advantage over you and me.

He who would valiant be,

Let him come hither;

One here will constant be,

Come wind, come weather

There’s no discouragement

Shall make him once relent

His first avow’d intent

To be a pilgrim.Whoso beset him round

With dismal stories,

Do but themselves confound;

His strength the more is.

No lion can him fright,

He’ll with a giant fight,

But he will have a right

To be a pilgrim.Hobgoblin nor foul fiend

Can daunt his spirit;

He knows he at the end

Shall life inherit.

Then, fancies, fly away,

He’ll not fear what men say;

He’ll labour night and day

To be a pilgrim.