How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright and poet, author of some thirty-eight plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets. He wrote for the public theatre and for audiences of every rank, and his effect on the English language is such that a great many of his phrases are now ordinary speech.
About this theme: Patience
Patience fares badly in an age measured in loading times. Yet nearly every tradition that wrote about it separates two things everyday speech runs together: waiting and enduring. The first is passive; the second is not. The Latin patientia comes from a verb meaning to suffer or bear — something actively carried, not an idle interval.
More by William Shakespeare
- Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
- All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
- Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
- There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
- The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
More on Patience
- Drop by drop is the water pot filled.— Buddha
- Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.— Ovid
- He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk.— Friedrich Nietzsche
- Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone a palace.— Croatian Proverb
- I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.— Marie Curie