The Power of Patience: How This Old-Fashioned Virtue Can Improve Your Life

The most important thing to know is that patience is something you do, not something you have or don’t have.

Your biography becomes your biology.

Not everything can be accomplished through willpower—sometimes what we need is a bit of wait power.

All this stimulation and outward attention has one effect: to make everything a blur and to create a sense of mental restlessness that is the antithesis of patience. David Shenk writes about this in The End of Patience: “As we go to higher info altitudes, where the information moves faster . . . our eyes, ears, and cerebral cortexes have more to ke

Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you, but not in the one ahead.

One reason for this is that a synonym for patience is self-possession. I love that word; it helps me remember that, with patience, we are in charge of our selves. We can choose how to respond to a given event, rather than being hijacked by our emotions.

“If we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience,” says Romans 8:25.

Impatience is a habit; so is patience. To change a habit, we need strong motivation, which comes from knowing the rewards that come from the new behavior.

What’s fascinating about patience in love is that when we accept one another as we are, we actually increase the possibility of change. That’s because our partner’s patience produces a safe haven where we are accepted, warts and all, and in the warmth of that acceptance we may actually feel safe enough to risk growing. Thus, our partner may even en