Quotes About Struggle

He even told me that anxiety and worry about the matter [i.e., university finances] had made him sick

This early experience made Grant tend to view war as a hard-luck saga of talented, professional soldiers betrayed by political opportunists plotting back in Washington.

One could now see in his face the subdued melancholy of a man who had sacrificed too much for work.

During one ghastly period in 1779, the continental dollar shed half its value in three weeks.

Hardly a period of his life was free of illness and depression.

Desperately eager to please his parents, he had exhausted himself in trying to scrub sin from his soul.

Paradoxically, it was the philanthropic effort that most frustrated him and most frequently violated his charitable principles.

In yet another political fracas, Coleman received a caning that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s.

He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me," he said of Clark.

It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.

With such uncommon respect for the dollar, he couldn't cope with the psychological demands of the University of Chicago and other philanthropic commitments.

The alopecia dealt a blow to Rockefeller's morale—the psychological effect is crushing for most people

It now seemed futile to try to halt a British advance upon the capital.

Though Potts wished to fight on, Scott was inclined to relent.

In this early period, Rockefeller was a chronic worrier who labored under a great deal of self-imposed stress.

She never entirely recuperated.

It is not easy to part with the wealth we have accumulated after years of hard work and difficulty

While drinking almost never interfered with his official duties, it haunted his career and trailed him everywhere, an infuriating, ever-present ghost he could not shake. It influenced how people perceived him and deserves close attention. As with so many problems in his life, Grant managed to attain mastery over alcohol in the long haul, a feat as impressive as any of his wartime victories.

He never seemed to take great pleasure in his accomplishments, and for the rest of his life, he craved a restful but elusive peace.

Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous.

All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.

Apparently he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Some invisible force was working against them.