Quotes About Struggle

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself -? ?and that is what it is when it dies? ?- the body tends to revert to a state of? equilibrium with its environment.

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Real science can be hard but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves.

The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.

Just think what the ordeal must be like for less intellectually robust people, less equipped by education and rhetorical skill than they are, or than Julia Sweeney is, to argue their corner in the face of obdurate family members.

We will not go quietly away. If in the future that requires violence

I should have been put down at birth.

You may grind their souls in the self-same mill, You may bind them, heart and brow; But the poet will follow the rainbow still, And his brother will follow the plow. JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY (1844–90) 'The Rainbow's Treasure

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.

Your fight is long from over, Deon. More of your kind will come... and they will come for you.

I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them.

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work.

He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

Things bled. They bled and bled and would not stop bleeding. There would be no dramatic end, she realised, only a slow withering […] bleeding and more bleeding.

A world of dew and within every dewdrop a world of struggle. ISSA

Adversity brings out the best in us ... It's everyday living that does us in.

He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will

cacophony of typewriter keys being pounded and typewriter carriages returning, phones ringing, men yelling and coughing, electric fans here and there droning as they hacked the unbearable heat into intolerable hot tufts.

He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys' smell and the dead wretched goats' smell, the broken terraces' smell and smashed olive groves' smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble.

It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.