Quotes from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary

Linda Kaplan Thaler ·  160 pages

Rating: (492 votes)


“Working just a little harder than someone else who might be just as talented (or even a bit more) is what will win the day.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. —STEPHEN KING”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“I’m not the smartest guy, but I can outwork you. It’s the one thing I can control.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“You’d be surprised at the edge you can develop by applying yourself for an extra half hour on something—a goal, a skill, a job. Pick the time of day when you are most productive (early morning, after a jog, or in the quiet of a Sunday evening) and instead of watching a sitcom, devote yourself to whatever “it” might be. A half hour each day adds up to 180 hours of extra practice a year!”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“Failure is how we learn—it’s how we develop and acquire grit.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary



“When confidence becomes a muscle memory, panic is replaced by peak performance.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“What this tells us is that children who are outperformed may give up rather than fight to improve, and those who do win may not feel compelled to keep trying as hard if even the losers get praise and a trophy.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“Aristotle, writing about the virtues of hard work, said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“Happiness is not the absence of problems. It’s the ability to deal with them.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary



“Hard work is good for the soul,” she would say. “And it keeps you from feeling sorry for yourself, because you don’t have time.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. —VINCE LOMBARDI Steve”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


“At the age of ninety-two, James spent months hunched over the kitchen table, learning the alphabet, practicing his signature, and slowly progressing to reading simple children’s books. Then his wife died, sending him into a tailspin and robbing him of his motivation to learn to read. But his story doesn’t end there. At the age of ninety-six, Henry became determined to try to learn to read again. This time he not only dove back into reading, but, with the help of a retired English teacher, he began to write, longhand, about his life, his time at sea, a man he lost overboard on one voyage, and what his grandfather’s farm was like in the Azores. He finished his memoir, and when he was ninety-eight it was published and became a bestselling book called In a Fisherman’s Language. It was optioned to become a film, and his success triggered a congratulatory letter from President Obama. Henry was working on his second book when he died at age ninety-nine in 2013. Henry’s story is remarkable on many levels. First, it took a tremendous amount of grit just to get by in today’s world as an illiterate adult. Even more remarkable was his determination to overcome it later in life.”
― Linda Kaplan Thaler, quote from Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary


About the author

Linda Kaplan Thaler
Born place: Bronx, NY
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Popular quotes

“Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life - to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.

And extremes - whether of dullness or fury - successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies - unconscious strategies- to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too - sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.

It takes courage to feel the feeling - and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?

I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?


“Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede


“Life had been a suit I'd only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.”
― Marisha Pessl, quote from Night Film


“everybody knows that the soul of a cat is formed from the composite souls of nine debauched nuns who failed in their vows.”
― Barry Hughart, quote from Bridge of Birds


“The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Girl in Hyacinth Blue


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