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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Patience

1 GAMSAT-style prompt on patience. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task B · ReflectivePrompt 1 of 1

Consider the following comments on patience.

  • Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

    Proverb

  • Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.

    Anonymous

  • All human wisdom is contained in two words, wait and hope.

    Alexandre Dumas

  • We praise patience in the poor and call it ambition when the comfortable refuse to wait.

  • Some doors only open to those who knock, and patience is just another word for never knocking.

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A reflective thesis is that patience is neither a pure virtue nor mere passivity, but a judgement about which things are worth waiting for and which demand that we act now. Open with a concrete experience of waiting, for a result, a person, a healing, where the hard part was not the time but the uncertainty. Then explore the tension: patience can be the wisdom that lets things ripen, or it can be the excuse we give for tolerating what we should change. A useful structural move contrasts patience with people, which is often love, against patience with injustice, which can be cowardice. Caution: avoid the comfortable lesson that good things come to those who wait, since some good things come only to those who refuse to.

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