Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Paul Goodman

Quote by Paul Goodman

“Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it.”

Quote by Paul Goodman

Author

Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman was an American novelist born on September 9, 1911, and died on August 2, 1972. His works are known for their deep psychological insights and critical reflections on social issues. more

You May Also Like

“It is the power of temperance, the steadying hand of wisdom, and the warmth of love for all that shapes my words even in the midst of the most heightened of disagreements. For if I allow temperance, wisdom and the warmth of love to guide any engagement I may have (even though it might be one with my most hostile enemy), I will have set the stage for a place where seemingly unassailable walls can come down, hands can be extended in unexpected friendship, and the impossible is made impossibly possible.”

“When our cause is young, we feel so intensely that it seems wrong to take it slow. This is our inability to see that burning ourselves out isn’t going to hurry the journey along. The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion. Not naïveté. It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead - humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you *must* do or say, not what you care about and wish to be. Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-intentioned, but ineffective self.”

“Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn't matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We're simply talking about a lot of hours - that to get where we want to go isn't about brilliance, but continual effort. It means it's all within reach - for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work.”

“And indeed, it was not her steady hand that made Boudica the greatest sniper who had ever sighted down a target. Nor her eyes, eyes that had picked out the Captain long moments before anyone else could have even identified him as a mouse. It was that she understood how to wait, to empty herself of everything in anticipation of that one perfect moment - and then to fill that moment with death.”