Neil Peart Quotes

To wish and wait From day to day Will never keep The wolves away.

I keep remembering from my early student days how I would walk at night through the streets, my hands bunched into fists in the pocket of my coat, my head hunched deep into my collar, and how I used to say, 'I want to work, I shall work'--and then I would come back home and be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.

I don't believe in failure, because simply by saying you've failed, you've admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them.

That which is always within our reach, is always the last thing we take; and the chances are, that what we can do every day, we never do at all.

Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

You can linger too long in your dreams.

It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. - Adam

... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

Worry is not thought; complaining is not action.

Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

A man was desired to rise from bed because the sun was already up. He replied: "If I had as far to go and as much to do as he has, I should be up by now; but having but a little way to go, I shall not get up yet."

I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen to me, which is more or less as pathetic as it sounds.

Waiting is far more difficult than doing.

Life is not too short... we just wait too long to begin it.

Hope, O my soul, hope. Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly, even though your impatience turns a very short time into a long one.

…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.

Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and remain tenacious and just believe the end will come. Other times it's not an issue. You just write on and the end comes naturally.

writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

Between being able to and actually doing something lies an ocean, and on its bottom rests all too often the wreck of willpower.

The individual who is mistake-free is also probably sitting around doing nothing. And that is a very big mistake.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

The only thing that happens if you wait, is that you get older.

In the conduct of almost every affair slowness and procrastination are hateful