Famous Quotes About Perseverance
6 sourced quotes about perseverancefrom history's great thinkers.
Quotes About Perseverance
“Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
— Address at Harrow School, 29 October 1941
Churchill visited Harrow School — where he had been a struggling student 50 years earlier — and delivered this address to boys who were growing up under German bombing. He was correcting the popular misquotation that strips away all qualification: his original command was not absolute stubbornness but the refusal to capitulate except where honour and reason require it. The distinction matters enormously in statecraft.
“A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.”
— Widely attributed to Mandela — commonly cited in motivational contexts; exact source unverified
The idea of a winner as a dreamer who persists aligns with Mandela''s biography: he spent 27 years imprisoned, ran for president at age 75, and governed a nation through its most delicate democratic transition. Whether or not he said this in these exact words, it describes the pattern of his life: choosing, repeatedly, to act on a vision the world had declared impossible.
“It always seems impossible until it's done.”
— Widely attributed to Mandela; exact origin uncertain — often cited but not found in documented speeches
Though this quote circulates widely as Mandela''s, researchers have been unable to trace it to a specific documented speech or text. The sentiment is genuine to his worldview — he repeatedly spoke of how challenges appear unsurmountable until the moment they yield — but the precise phrasing should be treated as a widely circulated attribution rather than a confirmed quote.
“Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”
— The Art of the Deal (1987)
This strategic reframe — defeat in one domain as intelligence about another — is a consistent theme in Trump''s business memoir, which describes several failed projects he reframed as redirections. The underlying logic is that information gained in failure is often more valuable than the confidence maintained by avoiding it.
“I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
— Interview, Smithsonian Institution Oral History Project, 1995
Jobs said this in a 1995 interview when discussing why so many technically superior companies had failed to build lasting products. His own career demonstrated it: Apple was near bankruptcy when he returned in 1997, and his turnaround required not just vision but sustained, daily effort through years of difficult execution. Perseverance was, he argued, the unsexy differentiator that separated good ideas from actual companies.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
— Disputed attribution; no verified primary source in Churchill's speeches or writings
This quote circulates widely but has not been located in Churchill''s voluminous documented output — his collected speeches fill over eight volumes. The spirit matches his character: he experienced catastrophic failures (the Gallipoli disaster, his "wilderness years") and political comebacks. But because the source is unverified, it is best appreciated as a distillation of his resilience rather than a recorded statement.