Quotes About Challenge

Among the world's religions, perhaps the best-known examples are Lao Tzu in China and the Buddha in India. Within the tradition of Israel, the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes are voices of an alternative wisdom that challenged the conventional wisdom of their day.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? (When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?)

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—                               I took the road less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. —ROBERT FROST

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?

On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.

I remember adapt," says Toby. "It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren't going to help out.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I refuse to say this. If it means I will have to forgive Mrs. Smeath or else go to Hell when I die, I'm ready to go. Jesus must have known how hard it is to forgive, that was why he put this in. He was always putting in things that were impossible to do really, such as giving away all your money.

But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

Would I laugh? Matter of fact, you would, says Zeb. Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.

One by one I could handle them, but if they combined into a mob of three I would have trouble. Divide and conquer would be my motto.

I want anything that breaks the monotony, subverts the perceived respectable order of things.

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

xxx all souls are equal in heaven. Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place for snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped up against the Tree of Life, now I've slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall!

Life sucks, end of story," said Ada.

I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

There is a little verse I remember from a child: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble begins. It doesn't say when a woman's trouble begins.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer...an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.