Quotes About Challenge

LIFE IS SUFFERING. THAT'S CLEAR. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.

It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible—even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us.

The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.

Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity.

Opportunity lies where responsibility has been advocated

And I have learned through painful experience that nothing is going so badly that it can't be made worse.

Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be more salutary than your pity?

Kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children (who are people too, after all), don't seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.

you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you

Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a thing? It's a stupid question. It's unacceptably naive. The answer is obvious. To dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default.

Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.

We'll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.

But winning at everything might only mean that you're not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

If you wait instead until what you are refusing to investigate comes a-knocking at your door, things will certainly not go so well for you. What you least want will inevitably happen—and when you are least prepared. What you least want to encounter will make itself manifest when you are weakest and it is strongest. And you will be defeated.

Uma transformação voluntária de morte e renascimento – a mudança necessária para a adaptação em face de coisas terríveis – é por isso uma solução para a rigidez, potencialmente fatal, da falsa certeza absoluta, da ordem em excesso e da rotina.

Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destruction.

Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer—we're tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world.

When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others,

brilliantly & terribly

If you're going to insist on bending the world

Slay the dragon in his lair before he comes to your village. If you run from the things you are afraid of, you run from what you need, in fact, to find.

You're associating with people who are bad for you not because it's better for anyone, but because it's easier.