Quote by Teresa of Ávila: “Patience obtains all things.”

What force and urgency cannot achieve, time and steadiness often can. Santa Teresa is not advising passivity — she led the reform of an entire religious order. She is saying that enduring, persistent effort reaches places that impatience cannot. It is advice about power, not resignation.

Teresa lived and worked during the Counter-Reformation, a period of intense Catholic self-examination in response to the Protestant challenge. Her reform of the Carmelite order faced sustained opposition from within the Church, making her endorsement of patience as a power strategy deeply personal.

Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, and reformer who founded the Discalced Carmelites and wrote foundational texts of Christian mysticism, including The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. She was the first woman declared a Doctor of the Catholic Church, in 1970.