Quotes About Struggle

He entertains a confused wish to help her, without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it.

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.

I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. Nietzsche

Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don't like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch.

For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us.

Curajul de a nu fi înfrânt de anxietate, de a nu-i r?ni pe alÈ›ii din frustrare, de-a nu se înfuria prea mult pe lume pentru r?nile vizibile pe care le provoac?, de-a nu înnebuni È™i de-a reuÈ™i cumva s? treac?, mai bine sau mai r?u, prin greut??ile c?sniciei - acesta e adev?ratul curaj, acesta e eroismul care nu poate fi comparat cu nimic.

Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so.

Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing.

I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.

In fact, in Proust's view, we don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped.

Few things rival the torment of the once-famous actor, the fallen politician or, as Tocqueville might have remarked, the unsuccessful American.

there can be a savage edge.

Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses -- a night here and there -- it doesn't always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.

We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

Quanto mais difícil é a nossa vida, mais podemos nos comover à imagem graciosa de uma flor. As lágrimas - se elas vêm - são uma reação não à tristeza, e sim à graciosidade da imagem. Não que precisemos nos preocupar. Pelo menos pelos próximos séculos, teremos problemas suficientes para saber que não há o menor risco de as imagens graciosas deixarem de nos comover.

Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyone is extremely hard to live with. 

yet men die miserably every day

Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.

But she's not even remotely coping inside: it takes a certain strength to cry, the confidence that one will eventually be able to staunch the tears.

When one is sad, it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one's bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one's head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in the autumn wind.

Los hombres muchas veces desean el amor sin conseguirlo; buscan su propia ruina sin ser capaces de alcanzarla y de alguna manera, se ven forzados a permanecer libres en contra de su voluntad.

Children are always described from a third-person perspective ("Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid?") before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood.