To achieve anything worth something in this life is to learn to be patient, not just persistent. Tenacity and purposefulness aka perseverance don’t just mean obsessing over doing.
Achievement requires patience to plan out and see through roadblocks and hurdles. Your willpower will constantly be attacked by frustration, emotional difficulties, and overthinking. Poor planning is also a major culprit robbing you of your personal strengths.
So make it your mission to persevere, to withstand difficulties, drawbacks, relapses, and failure, to accept that which you cannot control. Use these perseverance quotes to look at your life, work, and feelings from a different angle. Then jump back in with new found inspiration and renewed energy and go push through!
I give you my favorite perseverance quotes from some of my favorite productivity authors and their books. Let’s kick this off with a playlist of songs about perseverance. I promise you, this stuff is better than those vegan energy shots or four tablespoons of coffee in your mug in the morning:
1. Don’t quit. Never give up trying to build the world you can see, even if others can’t see it.
— Simon Sinek
2. DO IT, THEN FIX IT AS YOU GO.
— Paul Arden
3. It’s better to regret what you have done than what you haven’t.
— Paul Arden
4. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you’ve got, and fix it along the way.
— Paul Arden
5. Truth hurts, but in the long run it’s better than a pat on the back.
— Paul Arden
6. You can’t let praise or criticism get to you.
— John Wooden
7. Will you be guided by faith? Or will you allow fear to overtake you?
— Napoleon Hill
8. Think progress, not perfection.
— Ryan Holiday
9. Willpower begins to fortify when you can consistently commit to specific behaviors that you can take action on immediately.
— Dean Dwyer
10. By working through the low points in your life and persevering, you can gain the insight needed to succeed.
— Napoleon Hill
Most Perseverence Quotes Used Here Are from The Following Authors:
11. Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets.
— Nido Qubein
12. While average people haphazardly pursue loosely defined goals, champions concentrate on the attainment of a singular purpose […].
— Steve Siebold
13. Every time you fall you have an opportunity to get up, dust yourself off and update your strategy […].
— Dean Dwyer
14. Eureka Moments Don’t Happen Immediately.
— Dean Dwyer
15. Give yourself an opportunity to discard or upgrade any beliefs that limit you.
— Steve Siebold
16. If you have been struggling with something for a significant period of time, then it is clear that you have not yet been able to pinpoint the exact problem. It is like my food log. I didn’t just say I wanted to eat healthier. I said that each day I would come in under 100g of carbs. BOOM! Instant rumble strip.
— Dean Dwyer
17. It’s easy to be seduced by plans that promote dramatic results. But the unfortunate truth is that extreme solutions are not sustainable long-term. They are just too taxing to get lasting results.
— Dean Dwyer
18. Be willing to embrace the notion that what you have long felt were character flaws are in fact system failures. And systems CAN BE LEARNED.
— Dean Dwyer
19. Teach yourself to begin to focus on small solutions knowing they are the driving force behind enormous change.
— Dean Dwyer
20. It’s impossible to change your behavior if you don’t know what the end result is supposed to look like.
— Dean Dwyer
21. Write down the single most important goal you want to achieve in the next twelve months and make a commitment to concentrate on achieving it — no matter what it takes.
— Steve Siebold
22. The best things in life make you sweaty.
— Edgar Allan Poe
23. The more thorough you are with predicting all the possible scenarios you might encounter that could lead to a result you do not want, the more likely you will be able to successfully put a plan in place to fend it off and have success.
— Dean Dwyer
24. Many successful people have found opportunities in failure and adversity that they could not recognize in more favorable circumstances.
— Napoleon Hill
25. When a performer begins to experience physical or emotional pain in the heat of the battle, the brain, whose primary role is self preservation, asks the question: ‘Why must I suffer?’ The champion will answer the question with the vision they have carefully constructed, and they will continue to fight.
— Steve Siebold
26. If it weren’t for the dark days, we wouldn’t know what it is to walk in the light.
— Earl Campbell
27. You cannot keep a committed person from success. Place stumbling blocks in his way, and he takes them for stepping- stones, and on them he will climb to greatness. Take away his money, and he makes spurs of his poverty to urge him on.
— George Gilde
28. Willpower is nothing other than a new behavior done consistently over an extended period of time. When I say extended, I’m talking years or decades, not weeks or months.
— Dean Dwyer
29. […] when you have fun, you can do amazing things.
— Joe Namath
30. I felt like I could score at will.
— Jack Maitlan
Jason Fried – Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work
31. World-class performers literally talk themselves into believing anything that gives them a mental edge.
— Steve Siebold
32. Cowards cling to the hope that failure will never happen and may be sloppy in the face of danger – not because they don’t acknowledge that it exists, but because they are just too afraid of it to look it in the eye.
— Simon Sinek
33. Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.
— Simon Sinek
34. What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.
— Mark Manson
35. Greatness is not born from one success. Greatness is born from persevering through the countless failed attempts that preceded.
— Simon Sinek
36. It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
— Timothy Ferriss
37. Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.
— Timothy Ferriss
38. People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.
— Simon Sinek
39. We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.
— Ryan Holiday
40. The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.
— Ryan Holiday
Please Lord, give me the joy, the strength, the perseverance and the BALANCE of a holy nun! pic.twitter.com/rDhnGVfrMa
— Fr. Goyo (@FrGoyo) March 20, 2019
41. It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life—that’s persistence.
— Ryan Holiday
42. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles.
— Ryan Holiday
43. Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.
— Ryan Holiday
44. Just be who you wanna be, man!
— Jonathan Levi
45. You can pick and choose, and assemble, and make whatever beautiful mess that you want to make out of your life.
— Jonathan Levi
46. […] have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
— Marie Curie
47. You will learn more about how to succeed from the failures than you will from the so-called successes.
— Napoleon Hill
48. Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
— Napoleon Hill
49. Be unfashionable. Take risks.
— Paul Arden
50. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
— Viktor Frankel
In the productivity milieu we like to use big words like “perseverance or milieu”. But what we all need is courage to withstand difficult times and moral support to deal with discouragement.
So don’t just read these perseverance quotes. Share them with someone you care about. Keep your close ones close and ally with those who motivate and inspire you. Nothing can stand in the way of someone with incredible ambition and a tight net of family and friends around them.
Persevere in doing good, in always returning to a state of calm and positivity and you’ll persevere in the unraveling of a wonderful life around you.
You can quote me on that last one. 
Executive editor, project manager, clinical psychology master’s graduate with a life-long obsession for personal development and mind hacking, inspirational quotes, and, productivity tools.