Quotes About Struggle

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon

They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids, seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.

Why, we're just petty insects, all of us, fighting on a pinhead planet.

Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar's lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

Hancock: You're not particularly bothered about the impending stagnation of Western Civilization, are you? Sid: No, not really. As long as my horses don't stagnate I don't care what happens. Hancock: Exactly. The struggle of the human race is nothing compared with your struggle up to the two-bob window at Cheltenham, is it? Sid: No, it's not.

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That gallant Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and closed the boozers at half past ten?

The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it's a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it's a life-extinguishing affair.

suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so as to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in - your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.

You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can't. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.

He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life.

An appeal to me in this fiendish row - is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.

If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man

She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life, said Heyst. It's a very respectable task.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.