Quotes About Struggle

All day while I've been thinking and talking about Phaedrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That's what's really wearing them down. The thought.

He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant. That seems to be Chris's problem now.

He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.

La paura del blocco non ha senso, perché quanto più rimanete bloccati tanto più vi si schiuderà la Qualità-realtà che di volta in volta vi libererà dal blocco. Quello che veramente vi blocca è il tentativo di fuggire dal blocco.

It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.

This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

Unsere Zeit ist eine Zeit der Erfüllung, und Erfüllungen sind immer Enttäuschungen.

He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.

Jeder Mensch kommt auf die Welt mit Kräften für die unerhörtesten Erlebnisse. Die Gesetze binden ihn nicht. Aber dann lässt ihn das Leben immer zwischen zwei Möglichkeiten wählen, und immer fühlt er: eine ist nicht darunter; immer eine, die unerfundene dritte Möglichkeit. Und man tut alles, was man will, und hat nie getan, was man gewollt hat. Schließlich wird man talentlos.

Er wollte nichts mehr von Beförderung wissen, die bei der Truppe nach der Rangliste vorrückte wie eine unsagbar langsame Uhr nichts mehr von den Vormittagen, wo man noch bei aufsteigender Sonne, von oben bis unten beschimpft, vom Exerzierplatz zurückkehrt und mit bestaubten Reitstiefeln das Kasino betritt, um die Leere des Tags, der noch so lang sein wird, um leere Weinflaschen zu vermehren;

Ä°nsan ne yaparsa yaps?n, dedi Niteliksiz Adam kendi kendine, omuzlar?n? silkerek çeÅŸitli güçlerden oluÅŸan bu yuma??n içinde bu, hiç, ama hiç önem ta??m?yor!

On her way back she thought she noticed that everything in the world was secretly contrived for beatings. It was just a thought that went through her mind. Parents their child. The state its convicts. The military its soldiers. The rich the poor. The coachman his horse. People went walking with big dogs on leashes. Everyone would rather intimidate another person than come to an understanding with him.

for one knows little of oneself unless one has someone else in whom one is reflected. And since what one knows is really nothing, might it not be that at times he wished Tonka dead so that this intolerable existence might be over and done with?

Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.

Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them.

Het valt niet te ontkennen dat wij in elke afzonderlijke tak van het menselijk kunnen zo veel vooruitgang boeken dat wij terecht het gevoel hebben het niet bij te kunnen houden; zou het niet mogelijk zijn dat daaruit ook het gevoel ontstaat dat wij geen vooruitgang beleven? Uiteindelijk is vooruitgang niets anders dan het resultaat van alle gezamenlijke inspanningen, en eigenlijk kun je dus al van tevoren zeggend at de werkelijke vooruitgang altijd juist dat zal zijn wat niemand wilde.

Sobald jemand im dem Rufe steht, ein Napoleon zu sein, gewinnt er auch seine verlorenen Schlachten.

At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece of work. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obsessive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. God help me, he thought, surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician?

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.