Quotes About Struggle

The constitutional disease from which I suffer," wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, "is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit, or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.

She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is.

I was in the middle of my second novel and struggling. Instead of engagement, I felt a nagging worry. Had I lost my way? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn—but where? One afternoon, I met a friend of mine, a poet and novelist, for coffee. "I feel like I'm in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there's no land in sight," I told him. He took a sip of his drink and peered at me over his glasses. "Yeah," he said. "And you're building the boat.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious.

Whenever a person is faced in life with a choice, his whole being trembles with the dilemma of what to do.

The Wissenschaftslehre is Fichte's means for coming to terms with, and if possible, mitigating, the painful existential division within our own selves.

The most intractable cause of genocidal killings emerges when competing groups—ethnic, religious, class, or ideological—feel that the very presence of the other, of the enemy, so sullies the environment that normal life is not possible as long as they exist.

Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into. 

miserable of all conditions in this world: that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and

Chi si lamenta della fatica, se sa di lavorare per la conquista della propria libertà?

This is a world of corpses strewn in streets and pits, yet in the deadcart itself a drunken piper wakes up to cry, 'But I an't dead tho', am I?' (p. 89).

after some time continually driving them from me, and letting

But as abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our greatest adversity, so it was with me

But from these three cats I afterwards came to be so pestered with cats that I was forced to kill them like vermin or wild beasts, and to drive them from my house as much as possible.

for now the hand of Heaven had overtaken me, and I was undone without redemption; but, alas! this was but a taste of the misery I was to go through, as will appear in the sequel of this story.

I would expostulate with myself why Providence should thus completely ruin His creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable; so without help, abandoned, so entirely depressed, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life.

how frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into.

In trouble to be troubled, Is to have your trouble doubled.

abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our greatest adversity

But I, that was born to be my own destroyer...

How frequently in the Course of our Lives, the Evil which in it self we seek most to shun, and which when we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very Means or Door of our Deliverance, by