Quotes About Challenge

I just believe that the feeling of wonder is amazing. I am pushing myself as far as I can humanly push myself... I can only hope for the best and expect the worse.

Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, its far over 20%.

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success." —Ernest Shackleton, advertisement for crew for 1914 Antarctic expedition

T]here is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order."17

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

Turn and face the strange changes.

If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.

You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.

I don't think we were built to be safe," he said. "I think we were built to try things.

It's not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril.

People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think.

Don't shoot, Colonel, I'll come down: I know I'm a gone coon.

This is the importance of the Irish problem for Marshal. It tested his capacity as not other episode of his life. He had to fend off the king with one hand & preserve his lordship in Leinster with the other. Here we find the first signs that the man had some streak of greatness in him; that he was more than a simpering courtier. In the Leinster years we discover why the Marshal came in the end to rule England.

We were eyeball-to-eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration

As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.

discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.