15 Quotes Tagged: grit

With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.

"I do the exact same thing now as I did when I was 21 in 1975. I sit and play with ideas. I'm never not working on material. Every second of my existence I'm thinking "Could I do something with that". It's like going into the gym everyday. You walk in everyday and say "Oh jeeez... I gotta do this again?!".

Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with. That's marriage, kids, work, exercise... It is not eating the food you wanna eat...

Find the torture you 're comfortable with and you'll do well."

Above everything else I've done, I've always said I've had more guts than I've got talent.

Grit is what’s left over when nothing’s left.

"They had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." on Challenger disaster

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we've already made. As we recognize what we've invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history.
Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength — these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows.
I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares.
I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy?
But a man doesn't need happiness for himself.
No, he can put up with any amount of torment — with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair.
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

Men are developed the same way gold is mined. When gold is mined, several tons of dirt must be moved to get an ounce of gold; but one doesn’t go into the mine looking for dirt — one goes in looking for the gold.

The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown. The only way out is through.

I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals. I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.

If you can say the word: good. Guess what? That means that you are still alive, that means that you are still breathing. And if you are still breathing... well now... you still got some fight left in you

The most dangerous person in the world is the one who shows up every single day even when the rewards are uncertain. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.

Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him me. By the gods I would fain see a Stoic. Nay you cannot show me a finished Stoic; then show me one in the moulding, one who has set his feet on the path

"It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry — if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again."