Willa Cather Quotes

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

I have learned long ago to possess my soul in patience and accept the inevitable.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

You do have to be patient. Control what you can control.

The first lesson to learn is to resign oneself to the little difficulties in life, not to hit out at everything one comes up against. If one were able to manage this one would not need to cultivate great power; even one's presence would be healing.

The storms come and go, the waves crash overhead, the big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on paddling. (Varys)

What may not be altered is made lighter by patience.

Set not thyself to attain much rest, but much patience.

When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil; while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.

What can't be helped must be endured.

It isn't important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

Being patient means to welcome wholeheartedly whatever arises.

You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

Things will go as they will, and there is no need to hurry to meet them.

What can't be changed must be endured.

Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change.

Patience is the art of hoping.

No, the only things which do not bother me are the elements. I can overcome them without a fight. All one has to do to get the best of the elements is to stand pat and one will win.

I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it.