Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Impatience

"Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success." - Brian Adam

"Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience." - Paul Boese

"Impatience never commanded success." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience." - George Horne

"Our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable as it is dangerous... our impatience to better the lot of our fellows." -

"It seems to me probable that anyone who has a series of intolerable positions to put up with must have been responsible for them in some extent; not that it was simply "their fault" - I don't mean that - but that they have contributed to it by impatience, or intolerance, or brusqueness - or some provocation." - Robert Hugh Benson

"Despair is the offspring of fear; of laziness, and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and often of honesty too. I would not despair unless I saw my misfortune recorded in the book of fate; and signed and sealed by necessity." - Jeremy Collier

"No man who witnessed the tragedies of the last war, no man who can imagine the unimaginable possibilities of the next war can advocate war out of irritability or frustration or impatience." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction." - Alexander Maclaren

"Love is like a charming romance which is read with avidity, and often with such impatience that many pages are skipped to reach the denouement sooner." - Sylvain Maréchal

"Patience doesn’t always help, but impatience never does." - Russian Proverbs

"Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Specious words confound virtue, and impatience in small matters may confound great plans." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"There are two main human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they don't return." - Franz Kafka

"Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength." - James Bryant Conant

"There is a 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." - John Ruskin

"Fear and impatience demagnetize. Poise magnetizes." - Florence Scovel Shinn

"The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary... and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity. " - James Keller

"I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day." - Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein

"My confusion, egotism, competitiveness, and impatience led to eruptions and quarrels within our community. Feelings were hurt, there were painful silences, bitter recriminations. We were experimenting with human interaction, and we discovered that we were loving, jealous, caring, bossy, cooperative, and competitive. After 23 years of living within community, I'm a good deal mellower. I've discovered something about forgiveness, mercy, and tolerance. Not as much, perhaps as I should have learned, but more than I knew before. I can accept the deficiencies of other people, just as I can live with my own deficiencies, which, believe me, are legion." - Philip Berrigan

"God is nearer to us than any man at every time. He is nearer to me than my raiment, nearer than the air or light, nearer than my wife, father, mother, daughter, son, or friend. I live in Him, soul and body. I breathe in Him, think in Him, feel, consider, intend, speak, undertake, work in Him." - Saint John of Kronstadt, fully John Il’ich Serguiev, aka Holy Father John of the Kronstadt NULL

"You should not open your mouth except to express gratitude for benefits you have received, and never to mention your discontent." - Saint Vincent de Paul

"In all pleasure hope is a considerable part." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice." - Stefan Zweig

"We in the contemporary west may wake up each morning to cast out our sleep and dream experience like so much rubbish. But that is an almost freakish act of alienation. Only western society - and especially in the modern era - has been quite so prodigal in dealing with what is, even by the fictitious measure of our mechanical clocks, a major portion of our lives." - Theodore Roszak

"It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception." - Thomas Merton

"They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it." - Thomas Merton

"No longer could I doubt him true all other men may use deceit; he always said my eyes were blue, and often swore my lips were sweet." - Walter Savage Landor

"Learn from your dreams what you lack." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Patience perforce with willful choler meeting makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting. I will withdraw, but this intrusion shall, now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall." -

"Patience is not to clench your teeth and do nothing. It means to be prescient enough to trust the end result of the process. What is patience? It means looking at the thorns and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so myopic as to see the result. Whoever loves God remains patient, because he knows that it takes time incomplete moon to be full." - Elif Safak

"Perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind." - Elif Safak

"But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"Only those who try to live near God and have formed the habit of faithfulness to Him in the small things of our daily life, can hope in times of need for that special light which shows us our path. To do as well as we can the job immediately before us, is the way to learn what we ought to do next." - Evelyn Underhill