Difficulty Inspirational Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Difficulty Inspirational. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Never lose hope. Storms make people stronger and never last forever.
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Seneca
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Albert Einstein
Your friends will believe in your potential, your enemies will make you live up to it.
Tim Fargo
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
John Quincy Adams
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)
You have come a long way and have won many battles. Whenever you’re faced with a difficult or challenging situation, you’ll overcome it. Yes, you can.
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.
Oswald Chambers
Difficulties and adversities viciously force all their might on us and cause us to fall apart, but they are necessary elements of individual growth and reveal our true potential. We have got to endure and overcome them, and move forward. Never lose hope. Storms make people stronger and never last forever.
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What is the difference between an obstacle and an opportunity? Our attitude toward it. Every opportunity has a difficulty, and every difficulty has an opportunity.
J. Sidlow Baxter
Time of difficulty test our faith, our fortitude and our strenght. During these times, the level of our imaan becomes manifest
Yasmin Mogahed (Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles)
It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
Isaac Asimov
The only way I knew how to live the best day ever was on an expedition.
Hendri Coetzee
If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them.
William Arthur Ward
In the mist of Difficulty lies Opportunity.
Oprah Winfrey
King Norodom of Cambodia replied, “Lt. General Kawamura of the Japanese Imperial Army, It is my understanding that you Japanese are granting my people a partial freedom which is always subject to the approval of any laws we make by the Japanese Government in Tokyo!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
Michael G. Kramer
This hill though high I covent ascend; The difficulty will not me offend; For I perceive the way of life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear.
John Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress)
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
Martin Luther King Jr.
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion)
Somehow difficulties are easier to endure when you know your dream is waiting for you at the end.
Lisa Mangum (The Golden Spiral (Hourglass Door, #2))
Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream
Oprah Winfrey
We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.
Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)
US General Mathew Ridgeway was speaking about “Operation Vulture”. He said, “When the day comes for me to meet my maker and account for my actions, the thing that I would be most proud of is the fact that I fought against and perhaps totally prevented the carrying out of one of the most hare-brained tactical schemes that would have cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of men!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
Michael G. Kramer
This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore nil desperandum. March forward hero!
Sivananda Saraswati
This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the way to life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. Better, though difficult, the right way to go, Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.
John Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress)
For something to be great, there has to be some kind of trial or some type of struggle that actually makes it special or valuable to you. Otherwise, anything could be easily taken for granted.
Hayley Williams
Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.
Abigail Adams (The Quotable Abigail Adams)
Everybody in this life has their challenges and difficulties. That is part of our mortal test. The reason for some of these trials cannot be readily understood except on the basis of faith and hope because there is often a larger purpose which we do not always understand. Peace comes through hope.
James E. Faust
But Kazu still goes on believing that, no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.
Paolo Bacigalupi (The Windup Girl)
The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.
Epicurus
Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
When tough times come, it is particularly important to offset them with much gentle softness. Be a pillow.
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
Plutarch (Plutarch's Lives)
Difficulties are made to be overcome ~ Miss Felicity Lemon, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Plymouth Express
Agatha Christie
Discovering dance and its power to heal my soul played a key role in my survival.
Maria Nhambu (America's Daughter (Dancing Soul Trilogy, #2))
To them I was first a Black, then a Black from another country, and then a person.
Maria Nhambu (America's Daughter (Dancing Soul Trilogy, #2))
We should always be grateful for the faults in our partner because if they didn't have those faults from the start, they would have been able to marry someone much better than us
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
One way at a time I'll try to lend these broken hands of mine give my strength, be my light.
Joe Brooks
God always has a plan. This isn't his fault. This is a test, something designed to help you grow closer to God. And. I know, somehow, God will use it.
C.B. Cook (Paralyzed Dreams)
वसुधा का नेता कौन हुआ? भूखंड-विजेता कौन हुआ? अतुलित यश-क्रेता कौन हुआ? नव-धर्म-प्रणेता कौन हुआ? जिसने न कभी आराम किया, विघ्नों में रहकर नाम किया
Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' (रश्मिरथी)
The person who sees the difficulties so clearly that he does not discern the possibilities cannot inspire a vision in others.
J. Oswald Sanders (Spiritual Leadership (Commitment To Spiritual Growth))
When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader. Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own. With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser. What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.
Dean F. Wilson
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
Helen Keller
Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive. Most of our lives it is easy but for the moments when it becomes difficult, when accident or sickness or sadness strikes, it's just about remembering one thing. You must simply survive.
Shaun Hick
The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.
Horace Bushnell
What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?
Virginia Woolf (Night and Day)
Doubt is unacceptable and should not enter you; it is merely evil trying to divert you and increase the difficulty of your task
William O'Brien (Peter: A Darkened Fairytale)
If we can write or sing or create in some way, even when we are dealing with difficulties or pain, then it becomes something bigger than ourselves — and often beautiful.
Brenda Peterson
I may say that this is the greatest factor: the way in which the expedition is equipped, the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order, luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time, this is called bad luck.
Roald Amundsen
Life is hard, but it isn't the difficulties that create it; its the victories!! Not the kind of victories where you are standing on top of a mountain yelling out a victory chant- No! Those small victories are what defines life! The victories where you sometimes have to sit back and let the Lord handle the problem!
NOT A BOOK
Every great leader of the past, whose record I have examined, was beset by difficulties and met with temporary defeat before 'arriving
Napoleon Hill
For within your flesh, deep within the center of your being, is the undaunted, waiting, longing, all-knowing. Is the ready, able, perfect. Within you, waiting its turn to emerge, piece by piece, with the dawn of every former test of trial and blackness, is the next unfolding, the great unfurling of wings, the re-forged backbone of a true Child of Light.
Jennifer DeLucy
The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place. Or, at least not yet again. As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility.
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
One question that has challenged me for some 50 years, is where did Ali “retire” after parting with Wallace in Singapore in 1862? Did he return to his home in Sarawak? Did he return to the spice island of Ternate, where Wallace said he had a family?
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski ("Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion)
Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.
Florida Scott-Maxwell (The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging)
Difficulty" is the name of an ancient tool that was created purely to help us define who we are.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Self-reliance conquers any difficulty
Yogi Bhajan
Whatever you do in your life, Son, the door of my heart will always be open to you.
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
When you learn to welcome every challenge and difficulty as an opportunity to grow and learn, no hardship or pain can generate suffering
Todd Perelmuter (Spiritual Words to Live by : 81 Daily Wisdoms and Meditations to Transform Your Life)
Amicu certus in re incerta cernitur' [A true friend is a friend when in difficulty]
Ennius
To think that you will be happy by becoming something else is delusion. Becoming something else just exchanges one form of suffering for another form of suffering. But when you are content with who you are now, junior or senior, married or single, rich or poor, then you are free of suffering.
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
Any place you don´t want to be, no matter how comfortable, is a prison for you.
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination…Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.
Wisława Szymborska
Why allow other people to control your inner happiness?
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
Without hope we fail to exist.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
When conversion takes place, the process of revelation occurs in a very simple way — a person is in need, he suffers, and then somehow the other world opens up. The more you are in suffering and difficulties and are 'desperate' for God, the more He is going to come to your aid, reveal Who He is and show you the way out...
Seraphim Rose (God's Revelation to the Human Heart)
Her hand touched his hardness "You're a big boy," she said, playfully."Had no complaints," replied Simon.
Patrick C. Notchtree (The Clouds Still Hang (The Clouds Still Hang, #1-3))
When true happiness shows up, the ego is bored with it: It's too plain, too ordinary, and it doesn't leave us feeling special or above the fray. It doesn't take away our problems, which is the ego's idea of happiness. The ego wants no more difficulties: no ore sickness, no more need for money, no more work, no more bad feelings, only unending pleasure and bliss. Such perfection is the ego's idea of a successful life. However, the happiness the ego dreams of will never be attained by anyone. The ego denies the reality of this dimension, where challenges are necessary to evolution and blissful states and pleasure come and go.
Gina Lake (What About Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment)
For in prosperity a man is often puffed up with pride, whereas tribulations chasten and humble him through suffering and sorrow. In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated, and in prosperity a man forgets himself; in hardship he is forced to reflect on himself, even though he be unwilling. In prosperity a man often destroys the good he has done; amidst difficulties he often repairs what he long since did in the way of wickedness.
Alfred the Great
I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience. NOTE: She neither said nor wrote this quote. Just because you saw it on Facebook does not mean it's true. Snopes is your friend. The quote was written by José Micard Teixeira
Meryl Streep
philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know; there's an irony: the difficulty consisted in this course is that it teaches what you already know; it works by taking what we know from familiar and unquestioned settings and making it strange. that's how the examples work. ... philosophy estranges us, not by providing us with new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. The risk is once the familiar turns strange it is never quiet the same again. Self-knowledge is like a lost innocence, however unsettling, you find it; it can never be unthought or unknown.
Michael J. Sandel (Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?)
Out of frustrations, out of desperation, out of disappointments, out of mediocrity. out of idleness,out of limited insight, out of difficulties, out of insatiability, out of poverty, out of pain and the vicissitudes of life , so many people shall come to a conclusion that nothing is worth living for; not even what is solemn and sacred but, some shall always turn the woes of life into great land marks and indelible footprints worth emulating
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Sometimes I feel proud of myself, not because of any success I’ve achieved, but because I’m aware of all the difficulties that I have suffered or went through. I’m an eyewitness at all the fear, weakness, frustration, failure, depression, refraction and bad luck moments that I’ve been through alone and which affected significantly but never was able to beat me for so long. This is why I’m proud, because I’m here now stronger that yesterday, I'm still able to stand and continue on my way, still following up my dreams, still trying my best to build better future for me and my family and I will never ever give up!
Shadi Kamal Kandil
Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want or keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.
Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough: A Collection of Inspirational Quotes)
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed...the habits of a vigorous mind are formed contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Everything happens for a reason, and nothing is an accident. It is all part of a much larger divine plan,” Duke Silverthorne said gravely, but in a surprisingly kind voice. “When difficulties come, we must see them as what they are—opportunities and a new path to discover your potential. How will you ever know the magnitude of courage you are capable of if you have never experienced the hopelessness of fear?
Farah Oomerbhoy (The Last of the Firedrakes (The Avalonia Chronicles, #1))
Everyone defends his treasure, and will do so automatically.The real questions are, what do you treasure, and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask. You can, however, save time if you do not protract this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it immeasurably.
Helen Shucman (A Course in Miracles, Combined Volume: Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers)
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.
John W. Gardner
Grief is what we add on to loss. It is a learned response, specific to some cultures only. It is not universal and it is not unavoidable. ... Grief is seeing only what has been taken away from you. The celebration of a life is recognizing all that we were blessed with, and feeling so very grateful.
Ajahn Brahm (Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties)
Each day is an opportunity for you to expand your horizon, to achieve your maximum potential. You may have encountered some obstacles along the way, but don't allow those moments to hinder your progress. In life, we all faces challenges that we must overcome. The importance is to learn from those difficulties and become stronger.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana (Sweet Destiny)
We're humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don't know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We've been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We're pessimists who believe it's too late so what the hell? We're the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance.
Jeanette Winterson (Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days)
A fulfilling long-term relationship is not accomplished by just finding the one. It is rather a co-operation between two passionate and highly motivated partners working together, figuring out every single situation holding hands. If there is trust at the root of the relationship, if the partners make an effort to keep it interesting, if difficulties are handled tactfully and if you can appreciate every single deed of your partner no matter how insignificant it is, the flames of love would never burn out and your love can truly live happily ever after.
Abhijit Naskar (The Art of Neuroscience in Everything)
There are two things that may happen to a person: the first is that you become so soft that no one and nothing can break you, and the second is that you become so hard that nothing and no one can break you. Either way you go, the path will be very painful. But herein is the great sadness of it all: that anyone must try to become something that cannot be broken (whether the soft or the hard). Why must we be born into a world where we must spend our lives struggling to become unbreakable?
C. JoyBell C.
Sometimes we bring to a struggle or cause the gifts we see most clearly, a courage, a strength, or a charm others have told us we have. But often we find more is asked of us than that, more than we intended or thought we possessed. We are asked to offer that which we thought dearest, to forgive what seemed unpardonable, to face what we feared the most and endure it. Sometimes we have to travel to the last step a path that was not of our own choosing. But I promise you this ... it will lead to a greater joy in the end. The difficulty is that the end is beyond our sight, it is a matter of faith, not of knowledge.
Anne Perry (A Christmas Visitor)
In this life, we reap the results of everything that we do; even if the things that we do and the things that we become, are the direct results of circumstances that we could have never controlled, in the first place. They say we are never given more than we can handle; but I don't believe that. We are often given more than we can handle, and that's why so many of us are so broken. The jar breaks when there's too much to handle. The only beauty in all of this, is that jars can be repaired with gold; and because of that, they can become even more beautiful than they were before.
C. JoyBell C.
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Value)
PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME' Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God. Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory. This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life.
Stephen K. Ray
A PRAYER   The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous, powerful, or “good,” but simply to be radiant. I desire to radiate health, cheerfulness, calm courage and good will. I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected—ready to say “I do not know,” if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality—to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid. I wish others to live their lives, too—up to their highest, fullest and best. To that end I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate, give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not needed. If I can help people, I’ll do it by giving them a chance to help themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example, inference, and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation.
Elbert Hubbard (A Message to Garcia: And Other Essential Writings on Success)
Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom--awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be with the words that we write: Oh often have I washed and dressed And what's to show for all my pain? Let me lie abed and rest: Ten thousand times I've done my best And all's to do again. I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse then it actually is--especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone--thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was quite alright--for isn't that partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who manage to feast on them. You see you can't have it both ways
Morrissey (Autobiography)
But later, just as we're turning the corner into my road, and I'm beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed... what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, *going out of her way*, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.
Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)