Quotes about perseverance

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

Going was easy. Keep on going was hard.

Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.

But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.

Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.

Thomas A. Edison "failed" ten thousand times before he perfected the incandescent electric light bulb. That is--he met with temporary defeat ten thousand times, before his efforts were crowned with success. p. 73

Most of us are good "starters" but poor "finishers" of everything we begin. Moreover, people are prone to give up at the first signs of defeat. There is no substitute for persistence. Failure cannot cope with Persistance. p. 86

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

Wanting to is the whole lesson; all the rest is practice.

"Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world."

What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.