Quotes About Struggle

Before you can see the Light, you have to deal with the darkness.

Life was never meant to be a struggle, just a gentle progression from one point to another, much like walking through a valley on a sunny day. — Stuart Wilde

Under the weight of my growing self-knowledge, my self-image was sinking fast.

In life, stress happens when you resist... No matter what comes your way, if you take a rigid position, you experience pain. Never oppose force with force. Instead, absorb it and use it... Yielding can overcome even a superior force.

the peaceful warrior's greatest battles don't lie in the external world, but within us. These inner hurdles generate most of the obstacles and difficulties we encounter in daily life. They carry greater danger than outer problems, because they slip, unseen and unnoticed, into our every endeavor.

When running up a hill, it's all right to give up…as long as your feet keep moving.

What good to conquer an enemy in battle, only to be vanquished by hunger or cold?

of course, we don't love painful feelings like anxiety or depression. We don't have to love or even like them, but we do have to accept them, as difficult as that can seem at times.

you may stir up problems around you because you're used to keeping life a little aggravating—because you don't cope well with smooth sailing. As

sometimes life more closely resembled improvisational comedy than strategic planning.

I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.

The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.

Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?

Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break.

The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor's God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him.

There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred.

Odd how the daily imperatives persist even in the face of collective disaster.

Entropy is a bitch

Sometimes there is no hope, whispered Das. There's always some hope, Mr. Das. No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain. Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?

At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.

I love being a poet. It's the goddamned words I can't stand.

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. Goddamn it hurts.

In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.