Quotes About Challenge

The dogmas of the quiet past,76 are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new,77 so we must think anew, and act anew.

Such acceptance is not entirely bad. In most cases, these ideas, opinions, and attitudes are quite serviceable. We should not have to think through everything ourselves. We do not need to challenge everything. But we do need to know how to conduct such a self-examination of our beliefs when it is required. Otherwise, we will live our lives as unwitting intellectual puppets.

3. Challenge your mind to make significant judgments. To Socrates, the capacity to judge for ourselves was the expression of our human dignity. No oracle, no law, no assumed belief, no unanimously held opinion was exempt from our examination of its validity.

In some of these cases, I found that I could not defend my beliefs adequately and needed to change my opinion. In others, I was able to reaffirm my convictions with real confidence. The point is that reexamining these basic beliefs was painful, sometimes agonizingly so. It was not a purely intellectual effort, but involved some of my deepest emotions. It challenged my sense of myself, since I had closely identified some of these beliefs with who I was and what I stood for.

Socrates immersed himself in the cutting-edge intellectual work of his day, then transcended it. He took advantage of the fact that the most exciting thinkers in the Western world were drawn to Athens. He sought them out, learned what they had to teach, then challenged what he had learned to enhance his own understanding.

Socrates always insisted that any of us could do what he did if we were willing to give full expression to our innate capacity to ask questions, learn from everyone, challenge our own beliefs, and stand up for what is right.

Questions can excite, disturb, discipline, or comfort, but they always stimulate inquiry.

Ronald H. Spector

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. (Quoting Churchill)

Even though a part of Lippmann was tempted to retreat from the world, to build "walls against chaos," he fought that temptation. He challenged himself, grappled with his demons, and deliberately pursued a career that forced him into the political thick of battle, did not allow him to withdraw from a fight, and exposed him every day to his enemies. That took a special kind of courage for a man who shunned personal contention.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

painful ambiguities.

To face a man in combat is challenge enough. To find the goddess in a woman is the life work of a man. Hard though the first may be, the second is the harder longer road. But every man seeks the woman of the dream, and only the best of men finds what he seeks.

Every gain, every success for women is taken to mean that men are being cheated and denigrated. To me it's healthier to turn the question around. While women were straining every muscle, nerve and bone for the last thirty years, while they labored to remake themselves, their lives and the world, what were twentieth-century men doing all this time? And how long will it take them to join in and support us?

If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to be.

You must accept that you might fail then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, and you don't branch out, you don't try-you don't take the risk.

É preciso ter a coragem e a autoridade de um Tolstói para nadar contra a corrente, desafiar as proibições e o clima geral da opinião pública e fazer o que manda sua consciência do dever".

They goaded me on to unusual efforts and caused me, and those around me, considerable suffering. Of course, the surprising thing was that my increasing success did little to lessen the tension.

Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.

I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.

when you declare yourself an unwilling victim of a known risk, you have postured yourself as a poor loser in a game you chose to play.

The foremost challenge for leaders today, we suggest, is to maintain the clarity to stand confidently in the abundant universe of possibility, no matter how fierce the competition, no matter how stark the necessity to go for the short-term goal, no matter how fearful people are, and no matter how urgently the wolf may appear to howl at the door. It is to have the courage and persistence to distinguish the downward spiral from the radiant realm of possibility in the face of any challenge.

Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.