Quotes about struggle

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“And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.”

“I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.”

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

“Cheating and lying aren't struggles, they're reasons to break up.”

“To Thetis,
Long overdue, I know, but every often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle. That is a human truth, I think. Even Peleus knew that.
-Seth”

“The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.”

“It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.”

“What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?”

“You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

“There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

“In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die? No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives.”

“Be Yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just Be.”

“But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest.”

“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.”

“Man struggles to survive, not to succumb”

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

“Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life long.”

“We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.”

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure…. you are above everything distressing.”

“Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)”

“With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.”

“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

“People struggle to live, not to commit suicide”

“… The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”

“It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.”

“(a womanist)

3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”

“In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers”

“As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”

“Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”

“I had never realized a woman could have to struggle to keep her hands off a man, but here I was, digging my nails into my palms, staring at the inside of my eyelids as though I could maybe see through them if I peered hard enough.”

“Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere.”

“You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!”

“Struggling is mandatory. Suffering is optional.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

“She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.”

“Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my travels and my dreams. Very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggles.”

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”

“It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?”

“She didn't struggle and so she didn't grow”

“Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.”

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

“We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.”

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…”

“Every war is a murderous struggle between foes. And yet, no army has ever marched into battle believing that the Creator had sided with their enemy.”

“You know how I always seem to be struggling, even when the situation doesn't call for it?”

“Divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat without a struggle.”

“And I could see his internal struggle become an all out war. "It wouldn't have made a difference. Not with Adrian involved," he said….. "I meant it. I won't be that guy Rose. I won't be that man that takes someone else's girlfriend.”

“What was the point in satin and lace if it didn't make a man struggle to speak?”

“She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.”

“The strongest oak tree of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.”

“And Isi always listened, never told Enna she had been foolish, never said hollow things like 'You'll be all right.'… Isi saw Enna's struggle and her sadness, and she understood.”

“Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.”

“The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle.”

“You must forgive me, for I struggled only for you.”

“He stopped what he was doing and pulled out his magic phone.

Okay, the phone wasn't magic, but it does things my computer struggles with.”

“There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.”

“What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?”

“Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”

“Very often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle.”

“She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.”

“… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…”

“I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.'

Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.”

“She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense”

“When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.”

“We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.”

“There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.”

“Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”

“pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence”

“the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.”

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

“Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.”

“I can't help feeling that there is no beauty without hope, struggle, and conquest.”

“Receive without conceit, release without struggle.”

“He frowned as he struggled to remember. It was like watching an elephant crochet.”

“having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.”

“Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.”

“Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.”

“... You have discovered the class struggle, or rather its reflection, in the ranks of the party.”

“The more clearly we express it that the whole weight of our future victories will lie on our enemies, the more, in my opinion, will it tend to shorten the war. We have covered a considerable distance towards peace. The Entente no longer has any possibility of beating us economically. Do they think they can beat us militarily, now that our position in the West has become better that it ever was? If the statesmen of the Entente wanted understanding, they ought to have taken advantage of the situation now, when the Reich Chancellor has offered them the hand of understanding. They are playing a wanton game with their misguided peoples. Let the example of Russia be a warning to them. Russia, which offered us the hand of understanding, could have obtained a good peace of understanding if she had not risked this peace through the arrogance of Trotsky. May this struggle bring us victory, but may it also bring the benefits of this victory for Germany's future.”

“In these facts we discover the cause of the popular discontent and outbreaks which have so frequently threatened the stability of the British throne and the peace of the English people. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham said, 'By the end of this century, either the Parliament must be reformed from within, or it will be reformed with a vengeance from without.' The disastrous failure of Republicanism in France delayed the fulfillment of his prophecy; but when, in 1832, the people were on the verge of revolt, the government was reluctantly compelled to pass the celebrated Reform Bill, which has taken its place in English history beside Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. It equalized the basis of representation, and extended the suffrage to the middle class; and though the property qualification practically excluded the workingman, a great step upward had been taken, a concession had been made which must be followed by others. The struggle is again going on. Its omens are not doubtful. The great storm through which American liberty has just passed gave a temporary triumph to the enemies of popular right in England. But our recent glorious triumph is the signal of disaster to tyranny, and victory for the people. The liberal party in England are jubilant, and will never rest until the ballot, that 'silent vindicator of liberty', is in the hand of the workingman, and the temple of English liberty rests on the broad foundation of popular suffrage. Let us learn from this, that suffrage and safety, like liberty and union, are one and inseparable.”

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

“The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born and I am honored to be apart of something that focuses on working class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Kennedy have done so much in that regard for the two generations they've won over during their career course.”

“In most of the old colonial world, the struggle for independence is coming to an end. Even in areas behind the Curtain, that which Jefferson called "the disease of liberty" still appears to be infectious. With the passing of ancient empires, today less than 2 percent of the world's population lives in territories officially termed "dependent." As this effort for independence, inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, now approaches a successful close, a great new effort — for interdependence — is transforming the world about us. And the spirit of that new effort is the same spirit which gave birth to the American Constitution. That spirit is today most clearly seen across the Atlantic Ocean. The nations of Western Europe, long divided by feuds far more bitter than any which existed among the 13 colonies, are today joining together, seeking, as our forefathers sought, to find freedom in diversity and in unity, strength.”

“Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.”

“Now the battle for Canadian independence does have to be fought again, but against a new form of servitude. Our struggle today is different from that of the colonial peoples, fighting against national enslavement imposed upon them by the armed forces of foreign imperialists. We are threatened with complete national enslavement to a foreign power, but that power is not, at least not yet, imposing its control by the force of arms. Canada is being sold into United States control by "her own" ruling class; the parasitic, speculative, Canadian manipulators of stock market deals, politics and governmental concessions, who are enriching themselves by trading the national future of Canada for junior partnerships in the United States monopolies.”

“I pray now and I ask you to pray with me, as I prayed eight years ago, that I am doing, that we are doing, the right thing by our people; for the end of martial law does not mean the end of our efforts, of our needed reforms, of our struggles, of our sacrifices. The passing of martial law does not necessarily carry with it the passing of all the burdens especially the heavy ones. There will be more tests, for our capacity, for our resiliency, for our strength as a people. I say, we have just begun.”

“Above all, Fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.”

“I agree with him that we are going to work together for having this strategic agreement between United States and Iraq, and also to continue our cooperation in our struggle against terrorism and for promotion of democracy in Iraq and in Middle East.”