Plodding Quotes

#1. Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

John Ruskin

#2. Dom Paulo had not expected to convince him. But it was with a heavy heart that the abbot noticed the plodding patience with which the thon heard him through; it was the patience of a man listening to an argument which he had long ago refuted to his own satisfaction.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#3. No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included.

Richard Matheson

#4. To lose everything at such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, featureless life.

Laurence Gonzales

#5. I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

Holly Black

#6. Normal people can be happy with a regular life, but there is more to life than just plodding through an average existence.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#7. Public sentiment is not observed. The wealthy and powerful gain a ready hearing, but the plodding, suffering, unorganized complaining multitude are spurned and derided.

James B. Weaver

#8. The Babies we were are buried, and their shadows are plodding on.

Emily Dickinson

#9. Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive.

Vinnie Tesla

#10. Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#11. I believe firmly in plodding. Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it.

Douglas Wilson

#12. Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Jonathan Swift

#13. A plodding diligence brings us sooner to our journey's end than a fluttering way of advancing by starts.

Roger L'Estrange

#14. My preference is swimming in the sea. I find the sea is more liberating, wild and good fun rather than plodding up and down a pool.

Jo Brand

#15. Women are marvellous at plodding through
the centuries. They are exact, accurate and tireless. If you ever wish to discover some minute fact, buried away at the bottom of a bin of forgotten parchments, find a girl with horn-rimmed spectacles and straight hair and ask her to do it for you.

H.V. Morton

#16. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.

Tim O'Brien

#17. If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power.

Jesse Lauriston Livermore

#18. All that I have accomplished ... has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.

Elihu Burritt

#19. All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them in a clash of iron and a shriek of steam.

Ken Follett

#20. My only stake was the hook I shot in the moon, trying to capture stardom on my way to heaven. Without bravado. Just footsteps plodding me along till my big show. My showstopper. The one where I landed in a place without gravity.

Juliet Castle

#21. The plodding thrift and scrupulous integrity and long-winded patient industry of our business men of the last century are out of fashion in these "giddy-paced" times, and England is forgetting that those who make haste to be rich can hardly avoid much temptation and some sin.

Fanny Kemble

#22. Plodding wins the race.

Aesop

#23. Attitude lies somewhere between emotion and logic. It's that curious mix of optimism and determination that enables you to maintain a positive outlook and to continue plodding in the face of the most adverse circumstances.

Pat Summitt

#24. Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones

Charles Dickens

#25. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps.

Steve Martin

#26. Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines

#27. Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

Terry Eagleton

#28. Plod diligently. Plodding generally goes in the same direction, while pottering doesn't.

Douglas Wilson

#29. It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

Robert W. Service

#30. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

John Irving

#31. I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious ... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

Thomas Huxley

#32. Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."
"Are you saying we shouldn't hope?"
"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!

Margaret Weis

#33. Thus, Marlowe posed the silent question: could aspiring Icarus be happy with a toilsome life on land managing a plough with plodding oxen having once tasted the weightless bliss of flight?

E.A. Bucchianeri

#34. February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.

Hunter S. Thompson

#35. I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

Steve Martin

#36. The authorities? The authorities?" I laughed. "Why is it people think the authorities are some form of gods with either great justice or great, cunning evil, rather than the same plodding fools they see in their daily lives, and most of all in their mirrors?

Richard Ben Sapir

#37. It's easy to forget the ever-plodding eBay with all the noise made by the more lithe and lively Web 2.0 companies.

Kara Swisher

#38. Yes, we can all cart our fractured selves along as we move through our lives. But we can choose whether we keep plodding along the same rutted road, or take a turn we'd never thought was ours to take.

Rachel Simon

#39. Sam was creative and dedicated, but his wasn't the plodding bright-and-early work ethic of the morning person, like mine. It was the crazy creative burst of the night owl, long dark hours of despair before dawn.

Jennifer Echols

#40. The only people who have control over their careers are the ones you see on the covers of magazines. Everyone else is just plodding along making a living. The key is not to live over your means and overdo it.

Adam Baldwin

#41. The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself.

Richard Matheson

#42. Why, universal plodding poisons up The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long-during action tires The sinewy vigor of the traveller.

William Shakespeare

#43. And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last.

Robert W. Service

#44. I think it helps to have a good old-fashioned trajectory, plodding along. Obviously one has an ego and it's really easy to have that ego tickled, but what helps me get through the night is if I concentrate on just quality of work so that I don't panic about my profile.

Anne-Marie Duff

#45. The world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we're plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.

Dean Koontz

#46. Genius is a plodding intellect, incapable of dreaming up the obstacles that stop the rest of us.

Robert Breault

#47. One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

Stephen Spender

#48. The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.

Henry David Thoreau

#49. In the first of our conversations, you explained how different time was for you - how it's an abstraction. Some hours glide past like birds, others are slow, plodding behemoths, stubborn and unwilling to leave.

Fiddles McMonkeypants

#50. I am an archaeologist of mature vintage. Rapid descents are not my specialty. I am the plodding type."
~ Grace Madison, PhD.

N.L.B. Horton

#51. Could our plodding, our daily persevering through a life we didn't expect, don't want and didn't choose, actually bring blessing?

Cindee Snider Re

#52. In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity - please observe, a plodding mediocrity - for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#53. Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Joel Miller

#54. No worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities.

John Milton

#55. I hated the sight on TV of big, clumsy, lumbering heavyweights plodding, stalking each other like two Frankenstein monsters, clinging, slugging toe to toe. I knew I could do it better ... circle, dance, shuffle, hit and move ... make an art out of it.

Muhammad Ali