“And we also know that life itself is a seemingly endless battle. A battle between what is good and bad in us. What we can only possibly win by the only way, which is to conquer and defeat ourselves.”

Last update Feb. 10, 2024. History

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“In every battle, we don't always win. Perhaps we are defeated more often than not. We are made to hurt and suffer. We are made to cry and mourn each defeat, but we must not stop there. Because tomorrow there will be another battle. As long as we still have hope we must believe that one day we will win the battle. What can defeat us is the weakness of our own soul. We are not winners if we are unable to overcome our own fears and worries.”

Titon Rahmawan

“Now what I desire to know is this: If we want to shoot a man and he badly wants to shoot us, why should we not take his property (if we can) as well as his life? Isn't that the way men win a 'fatherland' first? Don't they fight and conquer the original owners and then take the land? Very well then, what is the good of being a soldier, of risking your life, and being a brave man in battle, if you cannot sieze from your beaten enemy, what your greater valor wins and what you stand badly in need of?”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

“Each of us wages a private battle each day between the grand fantasies we have for ourselves and what actually happens.”

Cathy Guisewite (1950) Cartoonist

“only the defeated know LOVE.
because it is in the realm of love that we
fight our first battles - and generally lose……..”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

“How can you win a battle, if you don't arm yourself? Only a fool enters into a battle he cannot win.”

Titon Rahmawan

“Nature knows no tragedies or catastrophes. It knows no good or evil. It knows only creation and destruction. and one can never truly be happy and free, in the way we were as children before learning of our mortality, without at some point confronting our destruction. And all we can ask for, all we can hope for, all we can beseech God for, is to win a few battles in a war we will ultimately lose.”

Neil Strauss book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life (2009)

“There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

As quoted in Honor Your Gifts (2007) by Dona M. Deane, p. 199.
Variant: But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for

“And we also know that life itself is a seemingly endless battle. A battle between what is good and bad in us. What we can only possibly win by the only way, which is to conquer and defeat ourselves.”

Related quotes

Related topics