Quotes About Struggle

Here's my problem. On Valentine's Day the flowers are wilting and so am I.

It is said that springs of sweet, fresh water pool up amid the saltiness of the oceans, that the fairest Alpine flowers bloom in the wildest and most rugged mountain passes, and that the most magnificent psalms arose from the most profound agonies of the soul.

A hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head winds right for royal sails. Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one wins the greatest victory until he has walked the winepress of woe.

And so it is with many people who casually live on the outer edge of their own souls until great thunderstorms of sorrow reveal hidden depths within, which were never before known or suspected

They tell me I must bruise The rose's leaf, Ere I can keep and use Its fragrance brief. They tell me I must break The skylark's heart, Ere her cage song will make The silence start. They tell me love must bleed, And friendship weep, Ere in my deepest need I touch that deep. Must it be always so With precious things? Must they be bruised and go With beaten wings? Ah, yes! by crushing days, By caging nights, by scar Of thorn and stony ways, These blessings are!

Every hard duty that lies in your path, that you would rather not do, that it will cost you pain and struggle or sore effort to do, has a blessing in it. Not to do it, at whatever cost, is to miss the blessing.

Being left alone by Satan is not evidence of being blessed.

bitter woe? Nay! but the time to trust Is in this moment's need, Poor, broken, bruised reed! Poor, troubled soul, make speed To trust thy God. What is the time to trust? Is it when hopes beat high, When sunshine gilds the sky, And joy and ecstasy Fill all the heart? Nay! but the time to trust Is when our joy is fled, When sorrow bows the head, And all is cold and dead, All else but God.

Poverty, hardship and misfortune have pressed many a life to moral heroism and spiritual greatness. Difficulty challenges energy and perseverance. It calls into activity the strongest qualities of the soul.

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

Magic doesn't come from talent, it comes from pain.

The hero pays the price.

He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.

Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer.

Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn't easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools.

She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.

But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.