No Need to Rush—Take a Deep Breath and Savor These 101 Quotes About Patience

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"You have to be patient," we're told as children—which then, oftentimes, becomes an inner monologue throughout our lives. Patience is a commendable virtue, yet its required endurance is difficult to master for many of us. Struggling to see the good that can come from a time of waiting or uncertainty? These 101 quotes about patience are sure to encourage you!

In childhood, the concept of patience is introduced during situations like car rides, putting on snow gear, awaiting the reward of ice cream after a long day of running errands, etc., and we continue to learn the importance of tolerating certain delays and less-than-ideal circumstances as time goes on. Whether there's an extra-long wait for your coffee order, you've been working toward a personal or professional goal for years, interruption after interruption derails your meeting, or you find yourself staring out the window, longing for warmer weather—we all have opportunities to practice patience on a regular basis.

These 101 patience quotes remind us that working on patience can be challenging, but it's a form of perseverance that produces deeper pleasure and contentment in daily life.

Take a deep breath with a renewed sense of purpose and inspiration thanks to these quotes about patience.

101 Patience Quotes

1. "You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience." — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

2. "Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance." — Samuel Johnson

3. "Patience is the ability to calmly wait or endure hardship without complaint or anger. It usually follows that one’s patience will be rewarded in some way, with a positive outcome or objective reasoning or peace of mind." — Kristie Anyabwile

4. "Patience will achieve more than force." — Edmund Burke

5. "There's something about patience that God deems necessary for our life in the age to come and so, whether through agriculture or discipleship or bodily development or eschatology or procreation, God makes us wait." — Russell Moore

6. "Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish." — John Quincy Adams

7. "That light bulb moment you had? The whole world didn't have it with you. Teach, speak, lead with the grace and patience you needed yesterday." — Sharon Hodde Miller

8. "Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious." — Phillips Brooks

9. "A stumble may prevent a fall." — Thomas Fuller

10. "Endurance is patience concentrated." — Thomas Carlyle

11. "Even a snail will eventually reach its destination." — Gail Tsukiyama

Related: 101 Inspiring Confucius Quotes

12. "There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience." — Jean de la Bruyère

13. "How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success." — Elbert Hubbard

14. "Joy and meaning can be found amid in-between times." — Ginger Blomberg

15. "Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will be powerless to vex your mind." — Leonardo da Vinci

16. "Fear both the heat and the cold of your heart, and try to have patience, if you can." — J.R.R. Tolkien

17. "Sometimes things aren't clear right away. That's where you need to be patient and persevere and see where things lead." — Mary Pierce

18. "One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life." — Chinese Proverb

19. "Whoever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul." — Francis Bacon

20. "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." — Leo Tolstoy

21. "Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it's how we behave while we're waiting." — Joyce Meyer

22. "The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others." — Erik Erikson

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23. "Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything." — George Bernard Shaw

24. "Hope is patience with the lamp lit." — Tertullian

25. "How poor are they that have not patience. What wound did ever heal but by degrees?" — William Shakespeare

26. "Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent." — Billy Graham

27. "Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day." — A.A. Milne

28. "Life is full of challenges, but I always have the Three Ps: Passion, patience and persistence. And the fourth one is pizza." — Butch Hartman

29. "Perfection is attained by slow degrees; she requires the hand of time." — Voltaire

30. "Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up." — Anne Lamott

31. "Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle." — Helen Keller

32. "Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope." — Corazon Aquino

33. "I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures." — Lao Tzu

34. "It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting." — Elizabeth Taylor

35. "The greatest power is often simple patience." — E. Joseph Cossman

36. "According to Scripture, patience isn’t just a virtue, but a mission of love." — Sharon Hodde Miller

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37. "The practice of patience toward one another, the overlooking of one another's defects, and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family, in the professions, and in society." — Lawrence G. Lovasik

38. "Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit." — Moliere

39. "The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it." — Arnold H. Glasow

40. "Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience." — Sherry Turkle

41. "Slow and steady wins the race." — Aesop

42. "Tolerance, compromise, understanding, acceptance, patience - I want those all to be very sharp tools in my shed." — CeeLo Green

43. "Patience is a conquering virtue." — Geoffrey Chaucer

44. "Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience." — Leo Tolstoy

45. "Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty." — John Ruskin

46. "Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures." — Joseph Addison

47. "Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength." — Charles Caleb Colton

48. "Genius is eternal patience." — Michelangelo

49. "Patience gives your spouse permission to be human. It understands that everyone fails. When a mistake is made, it chooses to give them more time that they deserve to correct it. It gives you the ability to hold on during the rough times in your relationship rather than bailing out under the pressure." — Stephen Kendrick

50. "Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance." — Virgil

51. "Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity." — Thomas Hardy

52. "This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time." — Haruki Murakami

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53. "Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." — Romans 5:3-4

54. "Learning patience can be a difficult experience, but once conquered, you will find life is easier." — Catherine Pulsifer

55. "Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request." — Philip Stanhope

56. "Humility is attentive patience." — Simone Weil

57. "Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does." — Margaret Atwood

58. "Patience is the art of hoping." — Luc de Clapiers

59. "If you want to see someone grow and change, don’t push them or pressure them or passive aggressively manipulate them. Wait on them. Give them space while you pray for them, instead of trying to force the right choice. Let them make mistakes, even if it’s painful and you know they might get hurt. Suffer with them, instead of walking away when they don’t take your advice." — Sharon Hodde Miller

60. "To lose patience is to lose the battle." — Mahatma Gandhi

61. "All men commend patience, although few are willing to practice it." — Thomas a Kempis

62. "When it comes to patience, we don't have to change old habits; we can build better ones." — Sue Bender

63. "When I was 20, I thought I was 30 - but I was so far from it. When you're young, you want everything to happen now. As you mature, you can look back and see all the great things you achieved with time and patience." — Elisha Cuthbert

64. "My dad said to me, 'Work hard and be patient.' It was the best advice he ever gave me. You have to put the hours in." — Simon Cowell

65. "No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing." — William Shakespeare

66. "I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.” — Margaret Thatcher

67. "We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world." — Helen Keller

68. "Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come." — Robert H. Schuller

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69. "Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

70. "Whoever is patient has great understanding, but one who is quick-tempered displays folly." — Proverbs 14:29

71. "Good books contain ideas that are beautiful or true or challenging. They raise subjects we may not think to discuss with a child in our everyday conversations. And they can cast everyday situations in a new light: Frodo’s perseverance in Mordor can instruct our kids in how to approach math—or temptation." — Ginger Blomberg

72. "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

73. "Patience attracts happiness; it brings near that which is far." — Swahili Proverb

74. "Patience is an act of love every day, when you are patient with your toddlers, or your husband who can’t remember to put the toilet seat down." — Sharon Hodde Miller

75. "Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence." — Hal Borland

76. "The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to “live for meaning” means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness." — Tim Keller

77. "Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes." — Tish Harrison Warren

78. "Often, life won't be gentle with you, so you have to become gentle with yourself." — Irini Zoica

79. "Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.” — Khaled Hosseini

80. "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” — Sophia Amoruso

81. "When you’re feeling overwhelmed or your body is giving you signs that you’re overdoing it; stop, breathe, and remember one thing: everything can wait. Fall in love with you. Love, support, validate, and nourish a relationship with yourself.” — Alexis Jones

82. "Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.”

83. "When people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five.” — Jane Austen

84. "Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart." — Rainer Maria Rilke

85. "Waiting is a sustained effort to stay focused on God through prayer and belief.” — Max Lucado

86. "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

87. "Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance.” — Mark Z. Danielewski

88. "Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

89. "Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit. The transformed nonconformist, moreover, never uses the passive sort of patience as an exercise to do nothing.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

90. "We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.” — Michelle Obama

91. "Sometimes if you have a difficult decision to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.” — Tina Fey

92. "God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him." — Tim Keller

93. "There's a humility in understanding that, well, the world does not revolve around me." — Tish Harrison Warren

94. "Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day." — Rainer Maria Rilke

95. "The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

96. "The Waiting Place...for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or the waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting." — Dr. Seuss

97. "All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?” — Anthony Doerr

98. "Sometimes the trick to getting the best of a situation was just to wait.” — Leigh Bardugo

99. "People will show you their good side. Almost everybody has a good side. Just keep waiting. It will come out." — Randy Pausch

100. "The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope." — Tish Harrison Warren

101. "Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” — Cormac McCarthy

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