Flann O'Brien Quotes

Success doesn't come instantly. Neither does the ability to lead.

In life, worthwhile accomplishments and acquisitions take time. Usually the better the reward, the more time it takes to acquire it.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Rome was not built in one day.

The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.

Eternal Rome

We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands.

I love Rome and the way that you can wander around and find something interesting around every street corner. You can smell the history.

Success is a fruit of slow growth.

What's nurtured slowly grows well.

No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.

Everything valuable takes time, there are no overnight successes.

It takes time to create excellence. If it could be done quickly, more people would do it.

Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time.

Neither a space station nor an enlightened mind can be realized in a day.

Really good things take time to grow. Foundation is not built over night.

Dreams do come true. They definitely do come true. It just takes a while, I guess. Sometimes it doesn't, but for me it did, anyway.

All that I have accomplished ... has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.

Be assured that every man's success is in proportion to his average ability. The meadow flowers spring and bloom where the watersannually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only. A man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. We know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. Wait till evening, and other parts of our day's work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil. As when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can tell best where the pressed earth shines most.

You don't get everything all at once. You wait.

For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.