C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Endurance
Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
Endurance is the crowning quality.
He conquers who endures.
Endurance is patience concentrated.
Patience and time conquer all things.
Prolonged endurance tames the bold.
Things may serve long, but not serve ever.
The bird that flutters least is longest on the wing.
The burden becomes light that is shared by love.
By bravely enduring it, an evil which cannot be avoided is overcome.
Through suffering and sorrow thou hast passed, to show us what a woman true can be.
The seal of suffering impressed upon our destiny announces in clear characters our high calling.
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune.
The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
To endure is the first thing a child ought to learn, and that which he will have most need to know.
There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.
There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently, however they have writ the style of gods, and make a pish at chance and sufferance.
Wounds and hardships provoke our courage, and when our fortunes are at the lowest, our wits and minds are commonly at the best.
Endurance is the prerogative of woman, enabling the gentlest to suffer what would cause terror to manhood.
Not in the achievement, but in the endurance of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite God.
To the disgrace of men it is seen that there are women both more wise to judge what evil is expected, and more constant to bear it when it happens.
Women are so gentle, so affectionate, so true in sorrow, so untired and untiring! but the leaf withers not sooner, and tropic light fades not more abruptly.
Our strength often increases in proportion to the obstacles which are imposed upon it; it is thus that we enter upon the most perilous plans after having had the shame of failing in more simple ones.
Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.
Allowing everything that can be claimed for the superior patience and self-command of women, still the main solution of their enduring pain better than men is their having less physical sensibility.
The women of the poorer classes make sacrifices, and run risks, and bear privations, and exercise patience and kindness to a degree that the world never knows of, and would scarcely believe even if it did know.
As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men’s minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious.
There is a sort of natural instinct of human dignity in the heart of man which steels his very nerves not to bend beneath the heavy blows of a great adversity. The palm-tree grows best beneath a ponderous weight, even so the character of man. There is no merit in it, it is a law of psychology. The petty pangs of small daily cares have often bent the character of men, but great misfortunes seldom. There is less danger in this than in great good luck.
“Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him.” It is a verse of climbing power. It begins with man, it ends with God. It begins with earth, it ends with heaven. It begins with struggle, it ends with a crown. Blessed is the man that endureth, stands up under it, resists, conquers. “Blessed,” for it means new wisdom, new strength, new joy,—“the crown of life.”