Quotes About Struggle

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the "happiness of mankind" as its promise.

The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fullness of life which each man seeks

Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken.

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.

What we think of man and God, of sin and salvation, is partly prompted by the comparative comforts or discomforts in which we live. It is a very sobering reflection on the lack of transcendence of the human spirit over the flux of historical change.

the mastery of historical destiny is a tortuous process in which powerful forces may be beguiled, deflected, and transmuted but never simply annulled or defied.

comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Mais rien, personne, ne peut empêcher la multitude de se ruer vers sa fatalité.

Il se trouvait prisonnier du passé, enchaîné par des ombres !

L'homme croit mourir pour défendre sa terre, sa femme, sa liberté, ses idées, alors qu'il meurt simplement parce qu'il est de trop.

Mon cœur, le couteau existent. Mon cœur parce qu'il saigne, le couteau parce qu'il taille ma chair.

I fear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in the imprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised.

Like a prisoner who dreams that he is free, starts to suspect that it is merely a dream, and wants to go on dreaming rather than waking up, so I am content to slide back into my old opinions; I fear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in the imprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised.

It is a common failing of mortals to deem the more difficult the fairer.

Yesterday's meditation raised doubts—ones that are too serious to be ignored—which I can see no way of resolving. I feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top. However, I shall force my way up, and try once more to carry out the project that I started on yesterday.

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.

No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life.

How did writing come to me? Like bird's down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.