Human Perseverance Quotes

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

I am afforded a bit of easy wonderment in relative comfort as to how humans have lasted so long. Climate- and geography-wise, the planet seems to have little use for us.

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him.

I decline to accept the end of man.

You see any movie, and it's just a feat of human strength and perseverance. It is a brutally challenging business.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.

I find faith in human perseverance, even as the universe throws challenge after challenge our way.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

Whether we athletes liked it or not, the 4-minute mile had become rather like an Everest: a challenge to the human spirit, it was a barrier that seemed to defy all attempts to break it, an irksome reminder that men's striving might be in vain.

Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors toward immeasurably distant goals.

It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

We plant a tree that won't be big enough to climb until we're too old to climb trees, we write constitutions to protect the rights of people who won't be born for another hundred years and may not be worth the trouble anyway, and we try to take care of our sick, though we all suffer from a disease for which there is no cure and no hope for one. We will not last and we know we will not - and still we write, carve, build, paint and plant to last. We are, it seems to me, very, very brave.

The methods by which men have met and conquered trouble, or been slain by it, are the same in every age.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.

It's amazing and sad what we have to do to survive sometimes.