Quotes About Struggle

The welfare system is the breeding ground of crime, addiction and radical politics.

I wish I knew. It's almost like nature is trying to show us that she's still more powerful than man. No matter how many of each other we kill in war, nature can still kill more of us. No matter how much we think we know about life, she still can make us look impotent.

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp. -James Ramsey Ullman

My eternal soul, Redeem your promise, In spite of the night alone And the day on fire.

We humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known, by seeking to psychologically steal it from the others--an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.

Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind banging and banging itself to pieces.

As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going

Whiskey is for drinkin', water is for fightin'." She frowned. "Mark Twain," he said.

It was said there were no atheists in a foxhole.

Leopold did not have to touch it to know to whom it belonged. It was as familiar as his own palm. It was his rosary, lost when he fell from the train. He closed his eyes. Look how far I have fallen, my Lord . . . He remembered Bernard so bowed by sorrow, so stricken by grief. Over me . . . a traitor.

The strong were always eating the weak.

When mankind pushes, natures sometimes pushes back

Though it was undeclared, there was a new world war being waged, where fundamental decency and respect for human rights were under assault by forces of intolerance, despotism, and blind fervor. And while its battles were sometimes waged in plain sight-- in New York City, in Iraq-- its greater struggle was carried on invisibly, fought in secret, its heroes unknown, its villains hidden.

Blessed are the horny hands of toil!

Over our manhood bend the skies; Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our age's drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.

It's 'most enough to make a deacon swear.

He was a man whom prosperity harmed.

Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs - even fight his wars for him - and he still won't acknowledge our existence.

All stories are ghost stories, about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted by the living.

I never found out exactly what it was that had hurt my friend so–something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.

I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that

I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.