What is Patience? Best Patience Quotes and Definitions

Patience is both a skill and a quality. It is the ability to wait for things. It isn’t a passive thing. It’s an active thing. It is the balance between the two extremes of impatience and complacency.

[Let us know in the comments about your favorite patience story or inspiration.]

What is patience?

Patience is both a skill and a quality. 

Healthy patience is the ability to wait for things. 

It allows for both delayed gratification and proactivity. 

“Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.”

― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

What is Too Little Patience?

We're pretty familiar with what it looks like to have too little patience. It extracts a cost to ourselves, our ability to achieve things, and our relationships. 

Examples of what's on the too little end of the patience continuum:

• impatience
• need for instant gratification
• frustration with people who need time to do something
• pushiness
• rushing things that need more time
• anxiety about things that need more time
• prematurely giving up on goals
• false urgency

“The biggest pitfall as you make your way through life is impatience. Remember that being impatient is simply a way of punishing yourself. It creates stress, dissatisfaction, and fear.”
― Susan Jeffers

"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it."

― Arnold H. Glasow

 

What is Too Much Patience?

We don't as often talk about the downsides of being too much of something that is considered a virtue, but when patience is taken too far it becomes unhealthy. Like too little patience, too much patience extracts a cost to ourselves, our ability to achieve things, and our relationships. 

Examples of what's on the too much end of the patience continuum:

• waiting too long
• complacency
• inaction
• not holding people accountable
• giving people too many chances to change
• waiting for things to just come to you rather than being proactive and trying to make things happen

"Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice."

― George Jackson

What is the Meaning of Patience?: Inspiring Quotes About Patience

1. “Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.”

― David G. Allen

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


3. "Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish."

― John Quincy Adams

4. "Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears."

― Barbara Johnson

5. In the fake it until you can make it category:

"Patience is the art of concealing your impatience."

― Guy Kawasaki

6. "Our patience will achieve more than our force."

― Edmund Burke

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

― Helen Keller

8. "There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient."

― Swami Sivananda

9. "If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought."

― Isaac Newton

10. Patience helps you listen to other people―a key to healthy relationships:

 "Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk."

― Doug Larson 

11. "Wise to resolve, and patient to perform."

― Homer


12. "Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown."

― Soren Kierkegaard

13. "I'm patient."

― Michael Jordan


14. "You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience."

― Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

15. "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

16. "Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

17. "He that can have patience can have what he will."

― Benjamin Franklin

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