“Fight like a man. Habit is overcome by habit.”
Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ
Source: The Imitation of Christ
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Someone within me is struggling to lift a great weight, to cast off the mind and flesh by overcoming habit, laziness, necessity.
I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march in my ephemeral breast, I listen to his panting struggle, I shudder when I touch him.
“Fight like a man. Habit is overcome by habit.”
Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ
Source: The Imitation of Christ
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist
Quote in: 'An interview with Helen Frankenthaler', by Geldzahler, The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 67
Frankenthaler explains the difference between gesture and signature in her painting
1970s - 1980s
Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth
Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 8 : 'Beyond the Beauty Myth', p. 290
Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma
"Rome, 9 January"
Without Dogma (1891)
Context: My position is such that there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not worth anything.
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Humanity is such a lump of mud, each one of us is such a lump of mud. What is our duty? To struggle so that a small flower may blossom from the dunghill of our flesh and mind.
Out of things and flesh, out of hunger, out of fear, out of virtue and sin, struggle continually to create God.
“[M]an when not stimulated by hope or necessity is naturally a lazy animal.”
George Trumbull Ladd (1842–1921) American psychologist, educator and philosopher
In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908), page 292
“The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift,
That no philosophy can lift.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Presentiments.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Dan Simmons book Hyperion
Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 5 (p. 355)