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“If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.”
Patience is portrayed as active endurance: the ability to continue without letting delay become defeat.
Source note: If—, first stanza; the line frames patience as sustained conduct under delay.
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“Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait.”
Progress is pictured as a combination of effort and patience rather than nonstop urgency.
Source note: A Psalm of Life, final line.
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“Slow but steady wins the race.”
Steady progress can defeat greater natural speed when the faster competitor becomes careless, distracted, or overconfident.
Source note: Moral printed after “The Hare and the Tortoise” in George Fyler Townsend’s translation of Aesop’s fables.
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“Let us not be weary in well doing.”
Courage can look like continuing useful work after enthusiasm fades, especially when results are delayed rather than immediately visible.
Source note: Galatians 6:9 in the King James Version; opening clause of the verse about perseverance.
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“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The closing sequence turns purpose into continuing action: effort, search, discovery, and refusal to surrender.
Source note: Poem “Ulysses,” final line.
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“Yet I did hope for success, and persisted in the undertaking.”
Douglass links hope with continued effort: uncertainty about the outcome does not prevent him from persisting in a difficult undertaking.
Source note: My Bondage and My Freedom; Douglass is recounting one of the practical struggles through which persistence accompanied his pursuit of greater freedom and independence.