Quotes About Struggle

I am never better than when I am mad: then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.

In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.

Our common preference as a species is for difference rather than unity. (Vive la différence. Vive la guerre.) Nobody designed us to be this way—it just happens to be how we blundered into the nightmare of being. Life preys on life, per Schopenhauer

Everything tears away at everything else … forever.

Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.

Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it—freedom, not reason—to pursue his plans for the future.

Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your "old self" is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your "old" reality.

He became a seeker of crowds, but the crowds thinned and abandoned him. He became a seeker of lights, but the lights grew strange and led him into desolate places.

There is nothing more futile than to consciously look for something to save you.

But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths, and nothing's true But what is horrible. If man could see The perils and diseases that he elbows Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, Which fall behind and graze him as he passes, Then would he know that life's a single pilgrim Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

God knows some days we all feel like losers.

Walking upright between the past and future, a tightrope walk across our times, became, for me, a way of living: trying to maintain a balance between the competing gravities of birth and death, hope and regret, sex and mortality, love and grief, all those opposites or nearly opposites that become, after a while, the rocks and hard places, synonymous forces between which we navigate, like salmon balanced in the current, damned some times if we do or don't.

It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?

Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.

When one is experiencing failure, it is hard to resist the comfort of paranoia.

College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience.