Quotes about Persistence

The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil. Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons.

If we can't finish, all our work is for nothing.

If we can't finish, all our work is for nothing.

Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Work—day-in, day-out exertion and concentration—produces progress and order. That's a law of the universe.

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.

RESISTANCE IS INTERNAL Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. Peripheral opponents, as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

RESISTANCE IS UNIVERSAL We're wrong if we think we're the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.   We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.   Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Praying always means praying through things and not giving up. It means being ever-watchful and persevering in prayer in order to see breakthrough. God wants us to be persistent in our praying. Don't forget to spend some quiet time praying to your Heavenly Father today.

God does a complete work, and He will see it through to the end. So don't give up because it's taking longer than you hoped. Be confident that "he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6).

Be encouraged when your prayers reveal progress that can be measured even in the tiniest increments. God is at work in your life and in the lives of those around you, and before long, little by little will add up to major change.