Quotes About Challenge

We may sometimes point out a road we are unable to follow.

To project yourself into a consciousness of a person essentially your opposite requires the audacity of great genius; and even men of genius are cautious in approaching the problem.

They girded their loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel.

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

I used to think a bird couldn't fly if its wings got wet.

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.

I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled.

Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.

This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art…

He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.

If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.

Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things.

Success is a bitter fruit: sooner or later, what you have created turns against you, becomes your torment.

Claude was just a good French girl of average breed and intelligence whom life had tricked somehow; something in her there was which was not tough enough to withstand the shock of daily experience. For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe: and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated84 by every mouth.

There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the corner, but the mother who bore me turned many a corner and made no answer, and finally she turned herself inside out and I am the answer.

At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster.

It hurts? Good.

Dreams have always expanded our understanding of reality by challenging our boundaries of the real, the possible.

But my hand was too small to do the gathering. [Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 79]

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do -- remember that -- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.