Gave Up Quotes

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

I never gave up. I never quit. I've been a leader all my life, from elementary school to president of my class to excelling at college. I had a dream, and my dream sustained me. I wasn't going to let anything stand in my way. I was like a meteorite. I wanted to become a star. It's been quite a journey.

Through everything I've gone through- and I've been everywhere, at the top of the world, in jail, hung over drunk - I never gave up my dream of winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood—and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition.

I never really had stage nerves but I did have had trouble getting up to the right energy level. For a long time I drank. I drank up until 1982 and then I gave up alcohol.

And if we are honest we have to make a distinction between a democratic Israel that wants to live in peace and the terrorists who want Israel wiped out. The Israelis were told to give up land for peace; they gave up the land, but got no peace.

I discovered that a diplomat's life is largely entertaining and meeting people. At the end of the day there's nothing. So I gave up.

We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual. For me, it's always a failure of diplomacy. Our willingness to immediately turn to a military solution is disturbing.

I decided not to give the haters the satisfaction that they got me so bad I gave up.

Just, you never know what the next day is going to bring. That goes for football, goes for off the field, and I gave up a long time ago trying to predict the future and trying to deal with things I couldn't deal with.

When I was 88 years old, I gave up meat entirely and switched to a plant foods diet following a slight stroke. During the following months, I not only lost 50 pounds, but gained strength in my legs and picked up stamina. Now, at age 93, I'm on the same plant-based diet, and I still don't eat any meat or dairy products. I either swim, walk, or paddle a canoe daily and I feel the best I've felt since my heart problems began.

The fear of rejection really kind of stunts your growth as a person.  I mean, it's like a friend of mine says, who cares if you fail?  Who cares if you fail?  It's like babies try to get up and walk all the time and they keep falling down.  If we just gave up, we'd all be crawling around.

I like myself better when I'm writing regularly. ... I was influenced a lot by those around me-there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields. ... I'm a country songwriter and we write cry-in-your-beer songs. That's what we do. Something that you can slow dance to...I never gave up on country music because I knew what I was doing was not that bad. ... Most of the stuff I've read about me has been true.

I gave up years ago on the concept that you could actually have balance in your life, I think it's a phantom chase.

Eventually I got asked to be in a Michael J. Fox sitcom called High School U.S.A. I didn’t think it was funny and said no. They doubled the money, and that kind of offended me. I realized, oh, that’s right, my opinion means nothing in Hollywood. I’d seen other people compromise, and I felt that once you gave up on what you wanted to do, you couldn’t go back. It was selling out. So I decided to go back to Minneapolis.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.

I gave up smoking, I never gave up the drinking. But it's hard to smoke and swim at the same time. You'd get to the edge of the pool and all you'd be wanting is a cigarette when all you actually really want is oxygen. So I traded the smoke for the oxygen.

I thought I couldn't afford to take her out and smoke as well. So I gave up cigarettes. Then I took her out and one day I looked at her and thought: 'Oh well,' and I went back to smoking again, and that was better.

That's what people respect, the fact that I wasn't a chump that laid on his back and gave up.

There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - were talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques. The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago.

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

The thing that happened in Washington -- it happened. All you can do is just grow from it. That took a toll on me. That was probably -- I think if I could've bounced mentally out of that situation faster than I did, I would probably still be in the NBA. But since I couldn't understand why they were trying to treat me like that, I basically gave up. I just didn't want to be a part of it anymore.

I used to smoke cigarettes, ten a day, but gave up when I was 28. Now my vice is several cups of coffee a day, which isn't great if you're prone to weak bones as I am, as caffeine can leach calcium.

My husband gave up all his work to stay at home with the kids, and we split all the duties at home. I do all the boring stuff - like pay the bills, and he does all the exercising for both of us, which Im very grateful for... I thank him for it regularly.

My opponents are the people who gave up our borders.

I knew right then you were the only one for me." He pulled her hand from his face, kissed her palm, then pressed it flat against his chest. "Beatings, battles, fights. No matter how bleak the circumstance, no matter how my soul despaired ... this heart never once gave up." His voice deepened, went thick with emotion. "I've a theory as to why. Do you want to hear it?" She nodded. "This heart is yours. It's yours," he said. "It always will be.

I gave up on the big screen. The Witching Hour was at Warner Bros. for 10 years and it just didn't work out.

She was really strong around me. Having me at 16 had to have been a big responsibility. My mom gave up everything for me, had three jobs, supported me, sacrificed her life for me.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.

I gave up my struggle with perfection a long time ago. That is a concept I don't find very interesting anymore. Everyone just wants to look good in the photographs. I think that is where some of the pressure comes from. Be happy. Be yourself, the day is about a lot more.

I didn't want to be a slave to any passion anymore. I gave up card playing altogether, even bridge and gambling - more or less. It took me a few years to get out of it.

I never gave up as a player, and I won't give up as someone who wants to go to the Hall of Fame, because it's the ultimate goal for a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player.

In fact, five years ago, after Saddam ejected the UN inspectors, John McCain and I gave up on containment and introduced the Iraqi Liberation Act, which, when it became law, made a change of regime in Baghdad official US policy. You might therefore say that, when it comes to Iraq, President Bush is just enforcing the McCain-Lieberman policy.

Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse, wouldn't quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he churned that cream into butter and crawled out. Gentlemen, as of this moment, I am that second mouse.

I finally gave up my little law practice and stayed home for about three years. You have to do what you can to keep the family going. But I wanted to get back to work. So I got another babysitter and went to work as an Assistant Attorney General.

We can't forget what happened on May 4th, 1970, when four students gave up their lives because they had the American constitutional right of peaceful protest. They gave up their lives. And to sing that song in that spot on that anniversary was very emotional for us.

That's the main reason I gave up my career after John was born and I was pregnant with Andrew. I could not handle going away day after day. The thought of going away before they got up and coming back after they were in bed was intolerable.

I'm afraid you gave up the right to pontificate on social mobility when you abolished educational maintenance allowance [EMA], trebled tuition fees and betrayed a generation of young people.

I gave up drinking once -- it was the worst afternoon of my entire life.

I know also another man who married a widow with several children; and when one of the girls had grown into her teens he insisted on marrying her also, having first by some means won her affections. The mother, however, was much opposed to this marriage, and finally gave up her husband entirely to her daughter; and to this very day the daughter bears children to her stepfather, living as wife in the same house with her mother!

Clothing sizes are weird, they go: small, medium, large and then extra large, extra extra large, extra extra extra large. Something happened at large, they just gave up. They were like, 'I'm not doing any more adjectives; you just keep putting extras on there.' We could do better than that: small, medium, large, whoa, easy, slow down, stop it, interesting, American.

Dad, you played rounders with me, even though you hated it and wished I'd take up cricket. You learned how to keep a stamp collecion because I wanted to know. For hours you sat in hospitals and never, not once, complained. You brushed my hair like a mother should. You gave up work for me, friends for me, four years of your life for me. You never moaned. Hardly ever. You let me have Adam. You let me have my list. I was outrageous. Wanting, wanting so much. And you never said, 'That's enough. Stop now.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

Success ... seems to be connected with action. Successful men keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit.

I gave up accounting. I went in for about six months writing ad copy. I was fired from that, and then another guy and I did a kind of poor man's Bob and Ray kind of syndicated radio show. Then I decided to stick it out and see what happened. I'd give it a year, a year became two years, and then two years became three years, and then along came the record album.

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.