Unremitting Quotes & Sayings

Ben wasn't the soft easily trod pathways of this Earth; he was its steep climbs and rocky outcrops, the soaring cliffs and impossible reaches. He was the route you had to take if you wanted to be tested and "have the very best there was at the end. And you needed to be exceptionally fit and ready to take on such challenges. Ben wasn't unstable at all. He was exactly as he was meant to be: a trial, which demanded and then rewarded unremitting effort. — John Wiltshire

The man of business knows that only by years of patient, unremitting attention to affairs can he earn his reward, which is the result, not of chance, but of well-devised means for the attainment of ends. — Andrew Carnegie

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life. — Anna Quindlen

Independence is not a static condition; it is a continuous conquest, and in order to reach not only freedom, but also strength, and the perfecting on one's powers, it is necessary to follow this path of unremitting toil. — Maria Montessori

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life. — Thomas Jefferson

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting. — Kay Redfield Jamison

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. — Julian Jaynes

We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. — Susan Sontag

Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pillar, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, ... Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? - Hell stalks abroad; - the lash resounds on the slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? - Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That's all you can do. That is your destiny. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Individuals who are prepared unflinchingly to confront the truth about their childhood and to see their parents in a realistic light. Unfortunately, it is very often the case that therapeutic success can be seriously endangered if therapy (as frequently happens) is subjected to the dictates of conventional morality, thus making it impossible for adult clients to free themselves of the compulsive persuasion that they owe their parents love and gratitude. The authentic feelings stored in the body remain untapped, and the price the clients have to pay for this is the unremitting persistence of the severe symptoms affecting them. I assume that readers who have themselves undergone a number of unsuccessful therapies will readily recognize their plight in this problem. In — Alice Miller

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity, to the end of my life! — Fanny Burney

Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance. — Thomas Jefferson

The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. — Joseph Campbell

My top priority will be to secure maximum value for money in aid through greater transparency, rigorous independent evaluation and an unremitting focus on results. — Andrew Mitchell

I've always treated the man with unremitting kindness, and if he wont do a little thing like this for me, I'll kick his spine through his hat. — P.G. Wodehouse

Karate cannot be adequately learned in a short space of time. Like a torpid bull, regardless of how slowly it moves, it will eventually cover a thousand miles. So too, for one who resolves to study Karate diligently two or three hours every day. After three or four years of unremitting effort one's body will undergo a great transformation revealing the very essence of Karate. — Anko Itosu

Most of all, however, these observances attack and undermine the very spirit of life within the minds of men. They afford to our Romans, from the street sweepers to the consuls, a vague sense of confidence where no confidence is and at the same time a pervasive fear, a fear which neither arouses to action nor calls forth ingenuity, but which paralyzes. They remove from men's shoulders the unremitting obligation to create, moment by moment, their own Rome. They come to us sanctioned by the usage of our ancestors and breathing the security of our childhood; they flatter passivity and console inadequacy — Thornton Wilder

Rest strengthens the body, the mind too is thus supported; but unremitting toil destroys both. — Ovid

What then is this harmony, this order that you maintain to have required for its establishment, what it needs not for its maintenance, the agency of a supernatural intelligence? Inasmuch as the order visible in the Universe requires one cause, so does the disorder whose operation is not less clearly apparent demand another. Order and disorder are no more than modifications of our own perceptions of the relations which subsist between ourselves and external objects, and if we are justified in inferring the operation of a benevolent power from the advantages attendant on the former, the evils of the latter bear equal testimony to the activity of a malignant principle, no less pertinacious in inducing evil out of good, than the other is unremitting in procuring good from evil. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

there must be a continuous struggle, a constant fight, an unremitting grappling with our lower nature, till the higher want is actually felt and the victory is achieved. — Swami Vivekananda

She did not need Miguel to explain that love, unconditional and unremitting, is the essence of life. She knew well that love based on conditions is a twisted copy of the truth, and yet it is there that humanity plays - there, in the shade of a metaphorical tree that wavers like a sullen mirage and scatters the seeds of a million lies. — Miguel Ruiz

The function of profits, finally, is to put constant and unremitting pressure on the head of every competitive business to introduce further economies and efficiencies, no matter to what stage these may already have been brought. — Henry Hazlitt

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps the more precious thing is the courage acquired through endeavor, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure'- grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure. — Aung San Suu Kyi

One should never learn from one's mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure. — Peter York

The British press are a group of unremitting scumbags. And sometimes they use that scumbaggery to good ends, and often not. — John Oliver

Yet had Fleming not possessed immense knowledge and an unremitting gift of observation he might not have observed the effect of the hyssop mould. 'Fortune,' remarked Pasteur, 'favors the prepared mind. — Andre Maurois

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it. — Emile Zola

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious. — Daniel Smith

If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else." "I know. An overwhelming passion for it." "No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong. — Anthony De Mello

My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Ideas for gadgets for the disabled were coming into my head so fast they seemed to be arriving from somewhere outside of me, beamed down by an unremitting force. I had little control over them, or their flow. I would wake up in the middle of the night. A blinding flash of an idea would rouse me from my bed and I'd rush down to my workshop to have a go at it before the inspiration dimmed. — Trevor Baylis

The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings. — Don DeLillo

After an unremitting and severe labour of two days, we returned to our old encampment with the loss of some of my horses, and my men excessively fatigued. — William Henry Ashley

Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils. — Thomas Jefferson

Femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle. — Pierre Bourdieu

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil. — Terry Eagleton

cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,' he wrote in his diary. 'The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.' His — Helen Macdonald

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Virtue is not vouchsafed to a soul unless that soul has been trained and taught, and by unremitting practice brought to perfection. — Seneca.

They have extended the arrogance and insularity of the worst kind of academic professionalism beyond the academy. Generally they show no fear or even slight anxiety at the responsibility they have assumed; they have no sense of awe in the face of the questions they have raised, and no sense of humility in the face of the traditions which they condescendingly dismiss. They are aggressively without a sense of mystery and without a suspicion that anything might be too deep for their narrowly professional competence. They mistake these vices for the virtues of thinking radically, courageously and with an unremitting hostility to obscurantism. — Raimond Gaita

The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. — T.E. Lawrence

We exhaust ourselves more from the tension and the consequences of internal disharmony than from hard, unremitting work. — Stephen Covey

A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous, and power-hungry leaders. — Mike Lofgren

A votary of ahimsa must cultivate the habit of unremitting toil, sleepless vigilance, ceaseless self-control. — Mahatma Gandhi

In Beirut, death's unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night's Russian missiles, brighter than a baby's smile. — Rabih Alameddine

Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement. — Felix Frankfurter

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading subjugation on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal. — Thomas Jefferson

Success is a product of unremitting attention to purpose. — Benjamin Disraeli

I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is. — Charles Dudley Warner

Your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students ... ' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible. — Millard Kaufman

I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of nations. — Thomas Jefferson

Customer service is just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate type of activity. — Leon Gorman

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow. — Anne Tyler

Freedom is not only bought with a great price; it is maintained by unremitting effort. — Calvin Coolidge

[ ... ] allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work into which the whole heart is put[ ... ]
There is no royal road to perfection. — Frederick Douglass

The human facility for perceiving speech begins very young: small babies have been shown to prefer the sounds of speech to nonspeech sounds. It is a fascinating paradox that humans can hear only up to fifteen different non-speech sounds per second, and beyond this they hear unremitting noise. Yet when they decode speech, they hear twenty to thirty distinct sounds per second. Somehow human speakers can pack, and in turn unpack, almost twice as many sounds if those sounds consist of consonants and vowels that are the components of the language they speak. — Christine Kenneally

There's a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It's a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. — Marlon James

See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir - this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee. Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, — Larry McMurtry

Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love his country. — Samuel Johnson

The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpationsall of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood. — Thomas Jefferson

Banish professionalism from our midst, Oh God, an din its place put passionate prayer, poverty of spirit, hunger for God, rigorous study of holy things, white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ, utter indifference to all material gain, and unremitting labor to rescue the perishing, perfect the saints, and glorify our sovreign Lord.
Humble us, O God, under your mighty hand, and let us rise, not as professionals, but as witnesses and partakers of the sufferings of Christ. — John Piper

Of course God's way of speaking to us is different from our way, but he does speak to us, and his words are intelligible; they are interior factors closely linked to the unremitting work of our conscience. — Saint John Paul II

The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy in Creation, this is a source of joy, as it is to those who rejoice in freedom ...
To those would-be solvers of "the human problem," who hope for knowledge equal to (capable of controlling) the world, it is a source of unremitting defeat and bewilderment. The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve "the human problem." Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests - with Genesis - that knowledge is the problem. Or perhaps we should say instead that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge: Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn? And, having learned, how and for what should we use what we know? (pg. 183, People, Land, and Community) — Wendell Berry

Hindsight has taught me that there is a ravenous, invisible twin haunting each of us. Despite "good works" and selfless sacrifice for noble causes, without unremitting vigilance, even tiny indulgences will betray high aims and deflect nourishment to this parasitic companion. Unfortunately, not even hindsight frees us from the consequences of such indulgence. Emmett — Peter Coyote

The driving force of a nation lies in its spiritual purpose, made effective by free, tolerant but unremitting national will. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness. — Joseph Campbell

Our city, these streets, I don't know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty facades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. — Haruki Murakami

Despite one or two minority appeals our society is not outraged at man's unremitting use of the animal world. Ecologists and environmentalists may talk of "ecological consciousness" or "environmental responsibility" but seldom, if ever, is this responsibility articulated towards other non-human species in particular. — Andrew Linzey

This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety . It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon which to establish happiness and peace. — Dalai Lama

Yea ! by your works are ye justified
toil unrelieved ;
Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;
Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;
Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ;
Courage that suns
Only foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns. — Gilbert Frankau

Let it be granted, that according to the letter of the Gita it is possible to say that warfare is consistent with renunciation of fruit. But after forty years' unremitting endeavour fully to enforce the teaching of the Gita in my own life, I have in all humility felt that perfect renunciation is impossible without perfect observance of ahimsa in every shape and form. — Mahatma Gandhi

It's difficult admitting you're wrong. Even more difficult admitting it when you have scoffed and otherwise ridiculed the truth with blind, unremitting determination, so blithely confident in your own infallibility. But then one day
or one night
the truth is put into your hands, and you realize those stories and songs and legends told by Northern strangers are truths after all, and that no one has lied to you. — Jennifer Roberson

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion. — Eudora Welty

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off. — Alan Bennett

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery. — Simon Hoggart

Hope is a strange invention - A Patent of the Heart - In unremitting action Yet never wearing out — Emily Dickinson

Contemplative love seeks a heroic deed that can be accomplished without delay and in full view of everyone. Indeed, some people are even ready to lay down their lives as long as the process is not long drawn out but takes place quickly, as though it were being staged for everybody to watch and applaud. Active love, on the other hand, is unremitting hard work and tenacity, and for some it is a veritable science. But — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is scarcely anything that is right that we cannot hope to accomplish by labor and perseverance. But the first must be earnest and the second unremitting. — Robert E.Lee

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today. — Fred Brooks

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. — E.L. Doctorow

He had his one life. In June 1942 he went to Lazarevo holding it in his hands. By the shores of the Kama, he found her gorgeous and restored, and not just restored to her original shining brilliance but enlarged and clarified. Light reflected off her, no matter which way she turned. They ran down to the almighty river. She never even looked back. She would never know what it meant to him, an unremitting sinner, after all the unsacred things he had seen and done, to have her innocence. He held her to him. He had dreamed of it too long, touching her. Dreamed of seeing her naked too long, beautiful, bare, ready for him. He was afraid to hurt her. He had never been with an untouched girl before; he wasn't sure if he was supposed to do something first. In the end, he did nothing first, but she baptized him with her body. There was no Alexander anymore; the man he knew had died and was reborn inside a perfect heart, given to him straight from God, to him and for him. — Paullina Simons

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion
like the phantom pain of an amputee. — Khaled Hosseini

Sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent "passing" as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. In this regard, depression stands as a nearly pure case of impression-management. For depressed individuals, the social requirement to "put on a happy face" requires subjugation of an especially intense inner experience. Yet, nearly unbelievably, many severely depressed people "pull off the act" for long periods of time. The price of the performance is to further exacerbate a life condition that already seems impossibly painful — David Karp

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure. Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon. The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness. — Henri Lefebvre

How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil. — Joanna Russ