Quotes About Struggle

when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down.

Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat "atheistic communism.

For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth.

culture consists in the sum total of efforts we make to avoid being unhappy

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming.

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.

It is all right to say, with Adler, that mental illness is due to problems in living,-but we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem.

When the average person…cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and terrible guilt.

To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy." And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.

He is a prodigy in limbo. In both halves

One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world.

But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.

modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.

If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.

Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies.

Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.

I'm not brave any more darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.