Quotes About Struggle

Why does no one tell you that work, not love, is the real salvation? Because if we told young people how life really was, they would beat us with their fists and ask why we brought them into this world. [Édouard Manet]

Shame and doubt, the two great cripplers... [Édouard Manet]

How was she to endure knowing he was in town these next two weeks, without throwing herself into his arms again? She would hide in her home and not come out until the day of the wedding. Yes, that was the only solution.

It is these moments that have led me here This need I had to sleep beside you That has caused all the trouble in my life. - excerpt from "Wanting You

After she received her umpteenth penalty, Cam paused the game and frowned at her. "You're not even trying to score. You're just hitting Logan.

Je connais mon coeur, ce coeur, ce nÅ"ud de vipères: etoufflé sous elles, saturé de leur venin, il continue de battre au-dessous de ce grouillement. Ce nÅ"ud de vipères qu'il est impossible de dénouer, qu'il faudrait trancher d'un coup de couteau, d'un coup de glaive: "Je ne suis pas venu apporter la paix mais le glaive

My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered my room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.

Le propre des hommes forts n'est pas d'ignorer les hésitations et les doutes qui sont le fond commun de la nature humaine, mais seulement de les surmonter plus rapidement.

History's tragedies reveal great men: but those tragedies are provoked by the mediocre.

There are no advantageous defeats, but there can be disastrous victories.

I'm doing the best I can. Getting old, that's what it is. I'll be fifty-three at the feast of Saint Michael. I'm no longer as strong as you are, young sirs,' said the ferryman.

The Grand Master felt surging within him one of those half-crazy rages which had so often come upon him in his prison, making him shout aloud and beat the walls. He felt that he was upon the point of committing some violent and terrible act – he did not know exactly what – but he felt the impulse to do something.

The shamrock on an older shore Sprang from a rich and sacred soil Where saint and hero lived of yore, And where their sons in sorrow toil.

Nevertheless, as Terray declared later, nothing would ever equal those first desperate days when he put forth every ounce of his courage, strength and resolution.

It feels like I've got all the flames in hell burning in my head.

Are we to believe that earth marks the most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come no farther than this?

When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.

I tried to lift myself above the fray; but, the higher I rose, the more I saw of the madness and the horror of it, of the justice of one cause and the infamy of the other. It is possible that one day, when time has wearied remembrance and restored the ruins, wise men will tell us that we were mistaken and that our standpoint was not lofty enough; but they will say it because they will no longer know what we know, nor will they have seen what we have seen. Maurice Maeterlinck. Nice , 1916.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.

To say "Hell is other people" does not mean "Heaven is me." If other people are the instruments of our torture, it is first and foremost because they are indispensable to our salvation. We are so intermingled with them that we must make what order we can out of this chaos.

The 'healthy' man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors.