“[A]lthough my attempted reconstruction of the view of Whitehead and Russell overcomes, I think, many of the difficulties, it is impossible to regard it as altogether satisfactory.”

— Frank P. Ramsey

As quoted by B. A. Bernstein, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 38 (1932), pp. 611-612.
The Foundations of Mathematics (1925)

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Frank P. Ramsey10

British mathematician, philosopher 1903–1930

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Morality of Mr. Winters”, p. 18
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“My father regarded nationalism, including Zionism, as an evil and although he never attempted to convince me of his views, his logic, here, was inescapable.”

David Goldblatt (1930–2018) South African photographer

In "Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975 – Some Afrikaners Revisited, 2006" (2006), as quoted in David Goldblatt – Afrikaners Photographed and Revisited (1975-2006) http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/12/david-goldblatt-some-afrikaners.html, The ASX Team, 28 December 2010

“The difficulty of determining whether a man is or is not good has now become a commonplace of moralists and satirists. It is almost impossible to discover any test which is satisfactory, and the test which is actually applied by society is known to be unsatisfactory in the extreme.”

John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian

pp. 57–58 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433068235500;view=1up;seq=87 Ecce Homo (1866)

“Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 225 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/225/mode/2up On the Basis of Morality (1840)

“What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

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. ]

“There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Si le grain ne meurt [If It Die] (1924), ch. III
Source: Autumn Leaves

“I had a great admiration for Pigou. I thought that, in many ways, he was not only a faithful follower of Alfred Marshall, but he was also a more fertile developer of the Marshallian tradition than Marshall himself. … Whitehead said to me:“Don’t you think that Pigou was an overrated economist? Wasn’t Foxwell a better man?” Since I am an honest man, I said to Whitehead:“No, I think Pigou was a much more important economist than Foxwell.””

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
New millennium

“For human beings, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. Rely on yourself, and you can overcome anything.”

Wei Jingsheng (1950) Chinese democracy activist and dissident

"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.”

Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) Anglo-Irish polar explorer

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

“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.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

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.

“[A]lthough my attempted reconstruction of the view of Whitehead and Russell overcomes, I think, many of the difficulties, it is impossible to regard it as altogether satisfactory.”

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Frank P. Ramsey10

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