We live in the era of Now. Not as soon as possible please, or within the next day, or even the next year but Now. Whether waiting for our morning Starbucks or a more significant life event, our fast-paced world has taught us to demand instant results. While Now is sometimes possible, it is often beyond our reach when it comes to other people, decadent dreams, and long-awaited hopes. But just because you can't have something Now, that doesn't mean Never. Patience is the ability to recognize the space between the Now and Never and understand its finite nature. Patience is learning to love the waiting, because it makes the end that much sweeter. Patience is faith in a greater plan, a greater fate; that your niche of the universe, dreamt for you before birth, is far greater than that which you can dream yourself.
The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.
~ Paulo Coelho
A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
~ Henri J. M. Nouwen
The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.
~ Leo Tolstoy
It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.
~ Charlotte Brontë
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Patience is not passive resignation, not is it failing to act because of our fears. Patience means active waiting and enduring. It means staying with something and doing all that we can - working, hoping and exercising faith; bearing hardship with fortitude, even when the desires of our hearts are delayed. Patience is not simply enduring; it is enduring well! Impatience, on the other hand, is a symptom of selfishness. It is a trait of the self-absorbed. It arises from the all too-prevalent condition called "center of the universe" syndrome, which leads people to believe that the world revolves around them and that all others are just supporting cast in the grand theater of mortality in which only they have the starring role.
~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf
The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life.
~ Joseph Bruchac
And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.
~ William Faulkner
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
~ Barbara Johnson
You can chase a butterfly all over the field and never catch it. But if you sit quietly in the grass, it will come and sit on your shoulder.
~ Anonymous