(“Quarryman” by Gustave Courbet)
"Stonecutter" is intended as an anthem to perseverance and is based on the following quote by Jacob August Riis :
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
It's one of my favourite quotes and it has helped me on several occasions