“What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy (chapters 86–93 of the so called Big Typescript), p. 161
Corresponding to TS 213, Kapitel 86
Context: What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden. ]
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Ludwig Wittgenstein 228
Austrian-British philosopher 1889–1951Related quotes
As quoted in The Rumi Collection : An Anthology of Translations of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (2000) by Kabir Helminski
"In Exile, Free Speech at Last in The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/22/in-exile-free-speech-at-last/4591c34b-12c4-4a86-be28-261f6a260b8d/ (22 November 1997)
“Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.”
Quoted in Shackleton (2013) by Roland Huntford https://books.google.cl/books?id=U6MNkTbRwtwC&pg=PT250&lpg=PT250&dq=Difficulties+are+just+things+to+overcome+after+all&source=bl&ots=3gWt7QcL43&sig=y5CzkBvxAdWC7MlWA3eP1eNkpDs&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Difficulties%20are%20just%20things%20to%20overcome%20after%20all&f=false
pages 176-177; Early Modern Texts page 16
Three Essays on Religion (posthumous publication), Theism, Part II: Attributes
“Any difficulty, large or small, stimulates the intellect to find a solution.”
Original: (it) Qualsiasi difficoltà, piccola o grande che sia, stimola l'intelletto a trovare una soluzione.
Source: prevale.net
“Difficulties give us the opportunity to prove our greatness by overcoming them.”
Message dictated to Sanjeeva Reddy at Guruprasad (6 June 1960), as quoted in The God-Man : The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an Interpretation of His Silence and Spiritual Teaching (1964) by Charles Benjamin Purdom, p. 353 <!-- also quoted in The Silent Master : Meher Baba, Avatar of the Age (1987), by Irwin Luck, p. 15 -->
General sources
Context: It is better to deny God, than to defy God.
Sometimes our weakness is considered strength, and we take delight in borrowed greatness.
To profess to be a lover of God and then to be dishonest to God, to the world and to himself, is unparalleled hypocrisy. Difficulties give us the opportunity to prove our greatness by overcoming them.
“The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome.”
Quotes, Concession speech (2000)
Context: I know that many of my supporters are disappointed. I am too. But our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country.
And I say to our fellow members of the world community, let no one see this contest as a sign of American weakness. The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome.
Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)
Context: A formidable range of phenomena must be scientifically sifted before we effectually grasp a faculty so strange, so bewildering, and for ages so inscrutable as the direct action of mind on mind. This delicate task needs a rigorous employment of the method of exclusion — a constant setting aside of irrelevant phenomena that could be explained by known causes, including those far too familiar causes, conscious and unconscious fraud. The inquiry unites the difficulties inherent in all experimentation connected with mind, with tangled human temperaments, and with observations dependent less on automatic record than on personal testimony. But difficulties are things to be overcome even in the elusory branch of research known as experimental psychology.
In his letter to Theo, The Hague, 11 March 1883, http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/12/274.htm?qp=art.material,as translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1991)
1880s, 1883
Context: It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.
A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it. Even though neither you nor I, in talking together, would come to any definite plans, etc., perhaps we might mutually strengthen that feeling that something is ripening within us. And that is what I should like.