Quotes About Challenge

Soviel ich weiß, enden viele Abstiege tödlich, weil die Aufsteiger vergessen, daß der Weg zurück ins Vertraute manchmal größere Leidensfähigkeit und die Aufbietung größerer Kräfte verlangt als die Route hinauf in den Traum.

The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like Virginia Woolf, it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.

My life was never intended to be one long slow descent into respectability.

In the dark, full of fear, fighting for life, the human mind could slip into pure instinct.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.

Where would you like to live? In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.

Thus in order to be a radical one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived.

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't run away from.

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair.

In whatever kind of a "race" life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.

T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things 'your best shot' then the other much-used phrases like 'land of opportunity' would kick in as well.

there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not. (Don't expect to be thanked, by the way. The life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.)

the first rule—he calls it the rule of rules—is the art of challenging what is appealing.

An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.

In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Sartre distinguished between rebels and revolutionaries. The rebel, he says, secretly quite wants the world and the system to remain as it is. Its permanence, after all, is the guarantee of his continuing ability to rebel. The revolutionary, in contrast, really wishes to overthrow and replace existing conditions. The second enterprise is obviously no laughing matter.