Book I, ch. 24.
Discourses
“Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.”
“There are some things which men confess with ease, and others with difficulty.”
Of Inconsistency, Chap. xxi.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
Context: And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible — the Bible, or a society of men — the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated.
“The difficulties in economic life arise mainly because men forget divine power”
Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter V, Reaction And Revolution, p. 220
“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. ]
“I will show," said Agesilaus, "that it is not the places that grace men, but men the places.”
Of Agesilaus the Great
Laconic Apophthegms
“The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.”
