“Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.”
Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author
Source: Human, All Too Human
“Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.”
Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author
Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron
Duke of Leeds v. New Radnor (1788), 2 Brown's Rep. (by Belt), 339.
“Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the man's character.”
Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary
Source: The Root of the Righteous (1955), p. 116.
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
“Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
“No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.”
Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan
The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 144
Leviathan (1651)
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist
1860s, Criticisms on "The Origin of the Species" (1864)
John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States
Letter to (22 August 1774), as published in The Life of John Jay (1833) by William Jay, Vol. 2, p. 345.
1770s, Letter to Lindley Murray (1774)
Context: Among the strange things of this world, nothing seems more strange than that men pursuing happiness should knowingly quit the right and take a wrong road, and frequently do what their judgments neither approve nor prefer. Yet so is the fact; and this fact points strongly to the necessity of our being healed, or restored, or regenerated by a power more energetic than any of those which properly belong to the human mind.
We perceive that a great breach has been made in the moral and physical systems by the introduction of moral and physical evil; how or why, we know not; so, however, it is, and it certainly seems proper that this breach should be closed and order restored. For this purpose only one adequate plan has ever appeared in the world, and that is the Christian dispensation. In this plan I have full faith. Man, in his present state, appears to be a degraded creature; his best gold is mixed with dross, and his best motives are very far from being pure and free from earth and impurity.