Quotes About Struggle

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.

A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.

Habitat doesn't replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.

Eventually, it can lead us to have compassion for everyone, when we see how we all must struggle with the downside of human nature. Everyone is crippled in some area, and everyone is somewhere on the path of evolution, some ahead of us, and some behind.

is the basic problem the nature of this world itself, or our inability to accept it as it is? Or something else?

Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life. That's the hope, anyway.

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.

The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.

We go mad to become sane sometimes.

we cannot tolerate them, we add stress to our lives by fighting a losing game.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within Oh cunning wreck that told no tale And let no witness in…. A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my life had entered it And there was room beside…

Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. —MARCEL PROUST, Guermantes Way, Vol. I

It took just such evil and painful things for the great emancipation to occur," Nietzsche said. He is also the one who said that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Feeling inadequate has always been my biggest problem.

The tragic youth was going down on me (...) I've been right and I've been wrong Now I'm back where I started from Never looked over reality's shoulder

Lord With a crooked stick for a cane I'm limping home. Mocked and maligned Stooped and stupid Soiled and shabby I limp toward You. —Ruth Harms Calkin

Let me go, day is breaking," he said. "I won't let go of you," said the other, "until I have your blessing." Now he asked him:"What is your name?" "Jacob," he said. "Not anymore Jacob, heel-clutcher, will be said in your name; instead, Israel, God-clutcher, because you have held on among gods unnamed as well as men, and you have overcome.

respond that we unfortunately seem to be running

A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising.

Trying to save Western society was exhausting.

The truth is their enemy,

Wendell Phillips declared: "Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.… Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.