Quotes About Struggle

What caused the gods to fall upon my family like starved lions in a Roman arena?

Wherefore the current of my soul hath broken The bounds of sensual life, And I am grown a god, a sinewy token Of Pan's most ardent strife; I am his own; I seem The shadow of his dream, As he is spinning thoughts of form and sense Out of the formless void, stark, cold and dense.

My mom lived by herself with two kids. Sacrifice was the name of the game at our house.

There were times when I thought I would never own a car.

Remember when you first learned how to swim? In the beginning you struggled mightily to keep your head above water. But then, one day, something amazing happened: You gave up fighting to stay afloat. And when you did, you rose to the surface and floated effortlessly.

But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.

life begins with endless lader but too short for man to go

That was life, wasn't it? You spend so much of it trying to find happiness, and then when you get some, you worry every day something is going to take it away.

I hate them." "Pity them, Emmon," Tosh said, "because the world they live in is small, and when it gets bigger fast, they won't know what to do.

part of the battle, before things had gone from bad to worse. Alem imagined himself in Tosh's position, with death coming

If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.

Waterloo is a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

Should we continue to look upwards Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. (Les Miserables)

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

No victorious revolution without an idea. Certainly! But just as certainly: It is not the idea which makes a revolution, but privation which causes it to break out. And once under way, it deviates from the idea.

I feel like Odysseus in Polyphemus's cave: "You will I eat last." To this Blumenfeld remarked on the telephone with a comforting quick wit: But Odysseus was not eaten, and it was Polyphemus who came to a bad end. […]

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, and given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the living.' Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

But darling Sasha, why resort to terrorism, murder? How awful.' He replied, 'What can one do, Mother, when there are no other means available?