How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
—Leonard Bernstein
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
—Oscar Wilde
Instead of bucking your head against a stone wall … sit quietly with hands folded and wait for the wall to crumble. If you're willing to wait an eternity, it may happen in the twinkling of an eye. For walls often give way quicker than the proud spirit which rules us. Don't sit and pray that it will happen! Just sit and watch it happen.
—Henry Miller
Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
—Mother Teresa
I'm tired of waiting. It's time for us to find our own voice, to do our own organizing, to push forward on reform, to push forward on issues of economic justice, and to make the United States of America, this good country, even better.
—Paul Wellstone
A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi to come back, but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.
—Marian Wright Edelman
Sometimes when you have something that seems too good to be true, you start waiting for it to crumble to pieces around you.
—Aurora Rose Reynolds in Assumption
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, whom would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
—Stephen Levine
Every moment that passes and I am stuck in this room is a moment that I am not working toward accomplishing my quest. Waiting is not acting. And not acting is akin to failing. How can I wait anymore?
—Bree Despain in The Shadow Prince
I can't keep doing this to myself, getting my hopes up so high, only to have them come crashing down. I can't keep waiting for him to come to his senses, having my whole emotional state rest on what he decides. What if he never wakes up to how perfect we'd be together? What if I spend another year pining for him — or longer even? In a terrible flash, I see my future stretching out before me: waiting for his calls, rearranging my life around college visits, and decoding texts and instant messages like they could be something real, something true. This isn't love; this is pure torment.
—Abby McDonald in Getting Over Garrett Delaney
If you have to speculate if someone loves you and wants to be with you, chances are they don't. It's not that complicated. Don't waste moments waiting and wondering. Don't throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesn't want you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up.
—Donna Lynn Hope
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
—Fran Lebowitz
I've found that often the quality you see in successful people is knowing when to take the initiative, and being quick about it. I've never sat around, waiting for someone to tell me to take charge. I just do it.
—R.K. Lilley in Bad Things