Quotes About Struggle

There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor.

Une immense esprance a travers la terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:'--and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having.

WITH SPRING CAME trouble.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

America has never been easy, and is not easy to-day. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT.

After one inflamed evening... he shouted at her: I'll make you tremble at the sound of my footstep. It was a historical phrase in her life. She had sat down and laughed till she was quite good-humoured and merry at the idea. He had stood bursting with fury and ignominy. And, by giving her as little money as possible, by drinking much and going out with men who brutalised him and his idea of women, he paid her back.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not moving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. she was giving way. She was giving up.

was in the grip of his moral, mental being.

When I have to struggle seeking after something, When I feel loneliness in helpless solitude, When I am in despair of myself —These are all thoughts of ourselves. Leave everything to zazen, letting go of thought, Or to single-minded chanting of the sound that sees the -world. At this time, even though we don't know it consciously Suddenly, whatever has happened The living reality of the self that is only the self is there, Just as the big sky is always the big sky.

Being poor produces a way of responding to life circumstances that, while warm and giving, is continually vigilant to threat and chronically stressed in ways that harm a person's mental and physical health.

So we have to find the realm of buddhas within the realm of demons. In other words, in the realm of pain and suffering, we have to find the realm of peace and harmony. This is religious practice.

Rise to the challenges that life presents you. You can't develop genuine character and ability by sidestepping adversity and struggle.

A person's true nature is revealed at times of the greatest adversity.

Strength is Happiness. Strength is itself victory. In weakness and cowardice there is no happiness. When you wage a struggle, you might win or you might lose. But regardless of the short-term outcome, the very fact of your continuing to struggle is proof of your victory as a human being.

Why is it that sometimes our prayers seem not to be answered? This is a manifestation of the Buddha's wisdom, so that we can deepen our prayers, become stronger people, live more profound lives and secure deeper, more lasting good fortune. If our slightest prayer was answered immediately, we would become lazy and degenerate. And we could not hope to build a life of great dignity and substance.

The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter.

I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy, -- the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and -- sometimes -- Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?

What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

There is in this world No such force as the force of A person determined to rise. The human soul Cannot be permanently chained.

The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.