Quotes about Perseverance

Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

The man isn't born for defeats.He can fall from grace,but he cannot be defeated.

Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs. He ate the white eggs to give himself strength. He ate them all through May to be strong in September and October for the truly big fish.

Perhaps wars weren't won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.

I could not fail myself and die on a fish like this, he said. Now that I have him coming so beautifully, God help me endure. I'll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.

YOU DO NOT know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly.

If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, Impossible, when orders came?

It is not bad," Santiago said. "And pain does not matter to a man.

It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought. "Nothing," he said aloud. "I went out too far.

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.