Quotes About Struggle

Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don't know it.

In that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything. The tragedies I had witnessed in the previous months all piled up and overflowed into one big, clumped-together sadness and suffering that I couldn't escape. It is what my friend William Paul Young calls the "Great Sadness," a pain so huge and deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day.

You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

You need a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

As Rilke put it, "When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

the state of mind of the "shipwrecked"3 is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

We wear the chains we forge in life

Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.

What you can't afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing, was a question for philosophers. Answer it and you'd have the kind of book Tom Ford would've considered worth writing: urgent and new and absolutely necessary. To write it, though, you'd have to be on fire.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who wanted anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

What made the contest between fate and free will so lopsided was that human beings invariably mistook one for the other, hurling themselves furiously against that which is fixed and immutable while ignoring the very things over which

maybe people did wear chains of their own forging, but often those chains were half complete before they'd added their own first heavy link. Maybe completing other people's work was the business of life.

What did it mean that he had so little access to something as straightforward as what he really wanted?