Selected struggle quotes

1. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

2. Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were.

3. When we are working at a difficult task and strive after a good thing, we are fighting a righteous battle, the direct reward of which is that we are kept from much evil. As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

4. You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through.

5. If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower.

6. If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

7. There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

8. Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

9. It is to hope, though hope were lost.

10. It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one.

11. A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

12. Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been, things remain.

13. It's hard enough to be alive and human, without the additional burden of being me.

14. At what point in my struggle with nature will nature finally give up?

15. I recently had my problems on the run, but now they've re-grouped, and are making another attack.

16. I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

17. Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

18. You know what I'm going to have on my gravestone? 'She did it the hard way.'

19. Overcome the devils with a thing named love.

20. We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

21. Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

22. And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano.

23. I'm an extremist, I have to deal with my own extreme personality, and I walk the fine line of wanting to die and wanting to be the ruler of it all.

24. Life's cares are comforts; such by Heav'n design'd; He that hath none must make them, or be wretched.

25. Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.

26. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

27. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.

28. I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

29. There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.

30. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

31. I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

32. No one conquers who doesn't fight.

33. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

34. I have had a life in which I have had to face every big fear, and it has not been pleasant.

35. The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

36. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.

37. All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.

38. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

39. We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

40. The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself - the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.

41. I do what many dream of, all their lives, --Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive--you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat-- Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)--so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.

42. Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men.

43. A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

44. The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

45. 'We all die in time,' the gunslinger said. 'It's not just the world that moves on.' He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. 'But we will be magnificent.' He paused. 'There's more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her-I would not have allowed the boy to die-if that was all there was.' 'What are you talking about?' 'Everything there is,' the gunslinger said calmly. 'We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.'

46. Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.

47. Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people.

48. I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.

49. Is life worth living? Yes, so long As there is wrong to right, Wail of the weak against the strong, Or tyranny to fight;

50. 'I get down for my Grandfather who took my momma/Made her sit in that seat where white folks ain't wanna us to eat/At the tender age of 6 she was arrested for the sit-ins/And with that in my blood I was born to be different/Now niggas can't make it to the ballots to choose leadership/But we can make it to Jacob and to the dealership/That's why I hear new music and I just don't be feelin' it/Racism still alive they just be concealin' it/But I know they don't want me in the damn club/They even make me show ID to get inside of Sam's Club/I done did dirt and went to Church to get my hands scrubbed/Swear I been baptized at least three or four times/But in a land where niggas praise Yukon's and gettin' paid/It's gonna take a lot more than coupons to get us saved/Like it take a lot more than du-rags to get you waves/Nothing as sad as that day my girl's father passed away/So I promise to Mr. Rainey I'm going to marry your daughter/And you know I gotta thank you for the way that she was brought up'

51. Life is a four-letter word

52. I fought against the bottle but I had to do it drunk

53. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it. To eight people she had said relentlessly that... For that reason, knowing what was before them - love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places - she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.

54. Me Against the World (1995)

55. The Rose that Grew from Concrete (2000)