Walter Pater Quotes

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

If you're never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you'll never get better.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.

I think with all the odd jobs I ever had, there was some kind of enlightenment but, yes, a lot of pain and suffering that I don't want to relive.

Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

What is defeat? Nothing but education. Nothing but the first step to something better.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

I'm continually trying to make choices that put me against my own comfort zone. As long as you're uncomfortable, it means you're growing.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

Life wasn't easy growing up; it was frustrating. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily, everything would have come easily, and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.

I like to challenge myself. I like to learn - so I like to try new things and try to keep growing.

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.

Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

I like being challenged. That's the only way you grow.

It takes obstacles to learn, grow, be better.

Looking back, my life seems like one long obstacle race, with me as the chief obstacle.

I like any story that starts one place and really takes a huge journey to a whole new place; that people in their life want to take that journey. They want to be able to find things in their life that aren't working and work through them to a new place of change.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

I have had a lot of setbacks that I have learned from.

A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I know well. For it is a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

As you wrestle with life... You're going to come out on the other end healed... I've fallen short sometimes, and I've risen pretty high a few times.