Patience & Timing

The fountain of death makes the still water of life play.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

The rejection of existence is still another way of existing.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason

以虞待不虞者勝。 • He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.

Sun Tzu The Art of War

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

The superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of Heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

If you are wholly perplexed and in straits,have patience, for patience is the key to joy.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

God himself cannot subsist without wise men," said Luther, and with good reason; but "God can still less subsist without unwise men,"—good Luther did not say that!

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

English Translation: "The truth can wait: for it has a long life ahead of it."Original (German): "Die Wahrheit kann warten: denn sie hat ein langes Leben vor sich.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

Farewell, good Strato. — Caesar now be still: I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

that new saint than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning

Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations