Top 80 Angela Duckworth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”

— Angela Duckworth

Featured in: Grit Quotes, Consistency Quotes, Keep Going Quotes, Grind Quotes

2. “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”

— Angela Duckworth

Featured in: Grit Quotes

3. “Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.”

— Angela Duckworth

4. “No whining. No complaining. No excuses.”

— Angela Duckworth

5. “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” And, finally, “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better – not reasons to quit.”

— Angela Duckworth

6. “To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.”

— Angela Duckworth

7. “Talent counts, effort counts twice.”

— Angela Duckworth

8. “Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.”

— Angela Duckworth

9. “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.”

— Angela Duckworth

10. “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”

— Angela Duckworth

11. “Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.”

— Angela Duckworth

12. “Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”

— Angela Duckworth

13. “Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.”

— Angela Duckworth

14. “I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

— Angela Duckworth

15. “Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. “I have a feeling tomorrow will be better” is different from “I resolve to make tomorrow better.”

— Angela Duckworth

16. “Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.”

— Angela Duckworth

17. “At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.”

— Angela Duckworth

18. “Failure is not a permanent condition.”

— Angela Duckworth

19. “The most important were challenges that exceeded current skills.”

— Angela Duckworth

20. “Interest is one source of passion. Purpose – the intention to contribute to the well-being of others – is another. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both.”

— Angela Duckworth

21. “As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong – so they can fix it – than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.”

— Angela Duckworth

22. “What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime.”

— Angela Duckworth

23. “A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find,” she tells advice seekers. “It’s much more dynamic. Whatever you do – whether you’re a janitor or the CEO – you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.”

— Angela Duckworth

24. “There are no shortcuts to excellence.”

— Angela Duckworth

25. “With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.”

— Angela Duckworth

26. “Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With.”

— Angela Duckworth

27. “A fixed mindset about ability leads to pessimistic explanations of adversity, and that, in turn, leads to both giving up on challenges and avoiding them in the first place. In contrast, a growth mindset leads to optimistic ways of explaining adversity, and that, in turn, leads to perseverance and seeking out new challenges that will ultimately make you even stronger.”

— Angela Duckworth

28. “I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them.”

— Angela Duckworth

29. “I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.”

— Angela Duckworth

30. “When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously.”

— Angela Duckworth

31. “Most of us become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience.”

— Angela Duckworth

32. “The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance.”

— Angela Duckworth

33. “It isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.”

— Angela Duckworth

34. “Stop reading so much and go think.”

— Angela Duckworth

35. “A vivid – if somewhat melodramatic – firsthand description of what deliberate practice can feel like comes from dancer Martha Graham: ‘Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.”

— Angela Duckworth

36. “Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.”

— Angela Duckworth

37. “The focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.”

— Angela Duckworth

38. “It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others.”

— Angela Duckworth

39. “In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities – his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow.” That.”

— Angela Duckworth

40. “When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won.”

— Angela Duckworth

41. “The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”

— Angela Duckworth

42. “It was a really winding road that took me to all kinds of places. And it was difficult, and discouraging, and demoralizing, and scary, and all the rest. But eventually, I got here. I got exactly where I wanted to be.”

— Angela Duckworth

43. “If you want to bring forth grit in your child, first ask how much passion and perseverance you have for your own life goals. Then ask yourself how likely it is that your approach to parenting encourages your child to emulate you. If.”

— Angela Duckworth

44. “People assume you have to have some special talent to do mathematics,” Sylvia has said. “They think you’re either born with it, or you’re not. But Rhonda and I keep saying, ‘You actually develop the ability to do mathematics. Don’t give up!”

— Angela Duckworth

45. “Since novelty is what your brain craves, you’ll be tempted to move on to something new, and that could be what makes the most sense. However, if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. “The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn.”

— Angela Duckworth

46. “It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things:.”

— Angela Duckworth

47. “Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In.”

— Angela Duckworth

48. “You can’t simply will yourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos has observed, ‘One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.”

— Angela Duckworth

49. “Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists.”

— Angela Duckworth

50. “Over time, we learn life lessons we don’t forget, and we adapt in response to the growing demands of our circumstances. Eventually, new ways of thinking and acting become habitual. There comes a day when we can hardly remember our immature former selves. We’ve adapted, those adaptations have become durable, and, finally, our identity – the sort of person we see ourselves to be – has evolved. We’ve matured.”

— Angela Duckworth