Quotes About Struggle

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Few artists can afford artistic temperament.

I would say, as loving as I am... I am definitely an extremely temperamental man who has a very large temper.

The institution of marriage has been something that - we have a very temperamental relationship, marriage and I. I've seen a lot of not great examples of it.

The sacrifice musicians make, the results they achieve are fantastic. These are the big people as far as I am concerned. So if they are temperamental, I don't hold it against them after all they had to go through to get to the top.

Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.

Once I was not allowed to offer prayers in temple and was attacked by my fans.

Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar?

When I was 20, I was the hustler - rubbing my temples, stressed, trying to get out the streets, trying to take my life to another side of the game with something I really loved to do: rap music.

The humanitarian aid system is built on a concept that when disaster strikes, outside agencies provide a temporary helping hand until people can take back control of their own lives. But across the world, we see millions of people caught in semi-permanent crises. As each year goes by, they are less and less likely to break free.

Ah, gravity: thou art a heartless bitch.

Something must be done when you find an opposing set of desires of this kind well to the fore in your category of strong desires. You must set in operation a process of competition, from which one must emerge a victor and the other set be defeated.

Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement - and we will make the goal.

In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It's the most insane thing we do.

So you got your reward; you got kicked in the teeth. That means you were doing good work. Getting kicked in the teeth is the reward for good work.

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.

Moths swarmed around the parking lot lamps, banging into the glass with a steady tap-tap-tap, and I wondered if they welcomed the dawn. At dawn, they could stop slamming their heads into the thing that forever kept them from the light. People don't have a dawn. We just keep slamming away until it kills us.

What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness.

The tree cannot walk, all its going must be violence. They listen to the saw cut, the roots scream. And in eating even a stalk of celery there will be pathetic screaming.

I thought if I were broken enough I would see the light like at the end of a small tube, but approachable.