Quotes About Struggle

but those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

For somewhere reigns an old hostility / between living one's Life and doing one's Work.

And you must be indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed; for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely, your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind. All the more futile perhaps for keeping to its direction, keeping on toward the future, toward what has been lost.

And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

This humanity of woman, brought forth in pains and degradations, will come to light when she has shed the conventions of mere femininity in the alterations of her outward station, and the men who today do not feel it coming will be surprised and struck by it.

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

Besser vielleicht, du wärest in der Dunkelheit geblieben und dein unabgegrenztes Herz hätte versucht, all des Ununterscheidbaren schweres Herz zu sein.

The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.

How he loved and yet wished to leave you: always both, at once.

We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up. This can occur. Anyone who has lifted his blood into a years-long work may find that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity is irresistible, and it falls back, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work.

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely, your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind. All the more futile perhaps for keeping to its direction, keeping on toward the future, toward what has been lost. Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe. But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow tree of joy. Loveliest in my invisible landscape, you that made me more known to the invisible angels.

Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don't know what work it is these states are performing within you?

What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great.

There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.

It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it... that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it...To love is good, too: love being difficult.

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

Und der Künstler ist immer noch dieser: ein Tänzer, dessen Bewegung sich bricht an dem Zwang seiner Zelle. Was in seinen Schritten und dem beschrankten Schwung seiner Arme nicht Raum hat, kommt in der Ermattung von seinen Lippen, oder er muß die noch ungelebten Linien seines Leibes mit wunden Fingern in die Wände ritzen.

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.

If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.

People have tended to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.