"Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."
— Maya Angelou

"Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
— Calvin Coolidge

"In my experience, nothing worthwhile has ever really been all that easy. But it certainly has been worthwhile regardless how difficult it seemed. "
— Robert Fanney

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."
— Hal Borland

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries."
— James A. Michener

"We are made to persist.
that's how we find out who we are."
— Tobias Wolff

"Life isn't as magical here, and you're not the only one who feels like you don't belong, or that it's better somewhere else. But there ARE things worth living for. And the best part is you never know what's going to happen next."
— O.R. Melling (The Summer King)

"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"Lucas: But once in a while people push on to something better. Something found just beyond the pain of going it alone and just beyond the bravery and courage it takes to let someone in. Or to give someone a second chance. Something beyond the quite persistence of a dream."
— One Tree Hill

"O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!"
— Kobayashi Issa

"Even the best inborn potentialities for achievement do not render unnecessary patient and persistent practice."
— Ralph Alfred Habas (The Art of Self-Control)

"They key of persistence opens all door closed by resistence "
— John Di Lemme

"The flowers in the mountains have broken through the rocks"
— Tennessee Williams (Camino Real)

"The only things you learn are the things you tame"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort."
— Harold Brodkey

"A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well."
— Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)