Quotes About Struggle

The downtrodden are more religious than the satisfied.

Father would have reconciled himself to poverty, but he couldn't do without glory.

There are people in this world who are doomed to die, and there are people who have not yet begun to live.

ODESSA IS A NASTY PLACE. Everybody knows that.

While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

In Odessa, luftmenschen skulk around coffee shops, looking to earn a rouble and feed their families, but there's no work to be had—and what kind of work could there be for a useless luftmensch?

Life is rubbish," he muttered. "The world's a bordello. People are swindlers…

I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can't win, but we're driven to give him a good fight.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.

For a subject people, independent statehood is a vital necessity and an advance; but once such a people has reached the stage of independence nothing can be more retrograde for it than to fix its mind on that stage and to refuse to look beyond it. The nationalism of a sovereign people cannot claim for itself the justification claimed by the nationalism of an oppressed people.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.

la vida es ante todo luz y se necesita muy poco para apagar esa luz.

Schlimme Gedanken kann man zurückschieben wie einen dunklen Vorhang, aber heller wird es dadurch nicht.

Es gibt Dinge im Leben, um die man kämpfen muss, weil die Zeit, die dafür bleibt, manchmal kürzer ist, als wir glauben.

In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . .

Best would have been if I'd died, I guess, but there wasn't much chance of that, not right off anyway... Next best was to make me want to die, but I had enough spite in me to want to live, usually.

The previous night, she'd dragged herself

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.