Quotes About Struggle

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

I'm a very positive person, but this whole concept of having to always be nice, always smiling, always happy, that's not real. It was like I was wearing a mask. I was becoming this perfectly chiselled sculpture, and that was bad. That took a long time to understand.

Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium.

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.

To me, onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well, and they fight you the whole way.

I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.

Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length?

Mental health isn't all of me, but it's a massive part of my journey and a massive part of my whole being.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

It destroys the soul to hear that you're all hype, that you have no talent, and that your whole career has been contrived.

I didn't have any of those good assets to have successful teenage years. It was hard. And what saved me was definitely my whole family. I knew where I was coming from and where I was going to.

They did it to try and belittle me, to try and to take away my pride. But I went through the whole system with them. And at the end, I - I wanted the public to know that I was okay, even though I was hurting.

White people just don't want their slaves to be free. That's the whole thing.

On 'Phoenix,' I talk about thoughts of suicide and my whole life. It's called 'Phoenix' because it's talking about dying - but when a phoenix dies, it's reborn from its own ashes. I related to that.

I wanted to be a singer forever. But it's not really my cup of tea. Having the whole world know who you are.

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.

As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not the only one down here in the muck - our whole culture is doting on tales of personal tragedy.

When you're that age - that middle-school age, early high school - you're changing. You're going crazy. So I put all of my energy into pretending I was someone else, battling and screaming and all that stuff - casting spells and getting into a whole fantasy world. It was really healthy for me.

Beverly Hills didn't save me from anything. It exposed me to a whole new world of problems I didn't know existed.

It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.

I went to school to learn to be a hairdresser. I worked at a wholesale florist, where I delivered to florists all over New Jersey. I'd come home and go out to work down at the Shore. The early jobs, I remember, were $5, $6 a night. And I lived in the projects right until the time I became successful.

There's a fundamental tension that is hard to overcome, that what's wholesome is not convenient and vice versa.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.