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Difficulty Quotes

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Difficulty Quotes

“No other human relationship can approach the potential for intimacy and oneness than can be found within the context of a marriage commitment. And yet no other relationship can bring with it as many adjustments, difficulties and even hurts. There's no way you can avoid these difficulties; each couple's journey is unique. But there is much you can do to prepare for that journey. An engagement is not just a time of preparation for a wedding, but also preparation for a marriage.”

Way Humans Found Can Do Hurt Journey Couple Approach Unique Commitment Difficulty Oneness Intimacy Preparation Engagement Adjustment Human Relations Human Relationships

Author:Dennis Rainey

“When a trout rising to a fly gets hoooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freeely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him. In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.”

“Much indeed to be regretted, party disputes are now carried to such a length, and truth is so enveloped in mist and false representation, that it is extremely difficult to know through what channel to seek it. This difficulty to one, who is of no party, and whose sole wish is to pursue with undeviating steps a path which would lead this country to respectability, wealth, and happiness, is exceedingly to be lamented. But such, for wise purposes, it is presumed, is the turbulence of human passions in party disputes, when victory more than truth is the palm contended for.”

Source: The Writings of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts; with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations

“Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.”

Humans Earth Simple Growing Difficulty Triumph Human Life Providing Triumphant Clouded

Author:Barry Commoner

“We have restricted humans from giving 'free' food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is 'free feeding'.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex

“This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.”

Source: The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales

“Сertainly there are people for whom anti-depression medication has allowed them to use difficulty to wake up, and I don't deny that at all, but as usual with us human beings, we've overdone it. We are self-medicating ourselves away from the great awakening moments, and losing our coping skills and losing wake-up calls.”

People Humans Self Moments Use Human Beings Skills Losing Difficulty Wake Up Deny Awakening Usual Coping Medication Wake Up Call Self Medicating

Author:Elizabeth Lesser

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?”

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.”

Knows Firsts Humans Mean Littles Persons Reason Difficult Human Beings Happened Events Difficulty Things Happen Memoir Reason Why

Book:Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings

Source: Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings

“There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.”

Humans Mean Solutions Difficulty Solve Human Experience

Book:Mind of the Maker

Source: Mind of the Maker

“Society is the true sphere of human virtue. In social, active life, difficulties will perpetually be met with; restraints of many kinds will be necessary; and studying to behave right in respect of these is a discipline of the human heart, useful to others, and improving to itself. Suffering is no duty, but where it is necessary to avoid guilt, or to do good; nor pleasure a crime, but where it strengthens the influence of bad inclinations, or lessens the generous activity of virtue.”

Source: The Rambler: In Four Volumes ...

“For hundreds of years the use of the word 'man' has troubled critical scholars, careful translators, and lawyers. Difficulties occur whenever and wherever it is important for truth-seeking purposes to know what is being talked about and the context gives no intimation whether 'man' means just a human being irrespective of sex or means a masculine being and none other.”

Knows Men Giving Years Humans Mean Important Use Purpose Sex Human Beings Difficulty Careful Seeking Critical Lawyer Scholar Masculine Translators

Author:Mary Ritter Beard

“A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.”

“'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.”

Humans Body America Beautiful Desire Artist Animal Powerful Air Performances Horse Difficulty Musical Narrative Fulfillment Latin Latin America Suspended Debut Underwater Humans And Animals

Author:Mark Doty

“If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much. But indeed there is always a difficulty in men living together and having all human relations in common, but especially in their having common property.”

Ifs Men Humans Littles Together Common Share Labor Difficulty Relation Property Complaining Communism Enjoyment Toil Human Relations Living Together

Book:The Essential Aristotle

Source: The Essential Aristotle

“At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.”

Humans Kind Life Is Joy Religious Promise Overcoming Difficulty Painful Peculiar Happy Endings Ordeals Religious Life

Book:The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life

Source: The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life

“The troubles of the 20th century are not unlike those of adolescence -- rapid growth beyond the ability of organizations to manage, uncontrollable emotion, and a desperate search for identity. Out of adolescence, however, comes maturity in which physical growth with all its attendant difficulties comes to an end, but in which growth continues in knowledge, in spirit, in community, and in love; it is to this that we look forward as a human race. This goal, once seen with our eyes, will draw our faltering feet toward it.”

“All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.”

Humans May Moments Human Beings Feet Human Nature Difficulty Disaster Thread Abyss Spoil Discontent

Author:Ivan Turgenev

“Do not be afraid to help one another. The devil is looking for rivalry, division, gangs. Keep working to make progress ... I have seen how pain does not stifle the hope deep within the human heart and how life goes on, finding new strength even in the midst of difficulties.”

Life Humans Heart Doe Helping Pain Progress Strength Goes On Findings Devil Difficulty Midst Division Human Heart Gang Rivalry Deep Within Life Goes On

Author:Pope Francis

“We live in a society where we're not taught how to deal with our weaknesses and frailties as human beings. We're not taught how to speak to our difficulties and challenges. We're taught the Pythagorean theorem and chemistry and biology and history. We're not taught anger management. We're not taught dissolution of fear and how to process shame and guilt. I've never in my life ever used the Pythagorean theorem!”

“No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.”

Should Humans Art Feelings Form Desire United Known Failing Subjects Pure Art Is Difficulty Fundamentals Instinct Judgement Abstract Erotic Spectators

Book:The nude: a study in ideal form

Source: The nude: a study in ideal form

“I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.”

Humans Self Space Support Building Difficulty Human Life Proven Ecosystems Circuits Sustaining Proven Wrong

Author:Charles Stross

“The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.”

Trying Humans Easy Race One Thing Difficulty Human Race Always Trying Dodge

Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton

“A small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties.”

Humans Moving Order Steps Difficulty Limitation Midst Confronting Small Steps

Book:The Name of God is Mercy

Source: The Name of God is Mercy

“Just as a human soul that faces great difficulties also faces great opportunities for spiritual growth, so a human society that faces destruction also faces the opportunity to enter a period of renaissance. I think that, barring an accident, the wish to survive will keep us from a nuclear war.”

Source: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words

“We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.”

Thinking Mind Humans Done Moments Past Realizing Human Beings Eternity Difficulty Enormous Present Moment Our Future Precise Your Future Past Present And Future Always Thinking

Author:Paulo Coelho

“That's all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this shape is a human being.”

Humans Looks Bits Loses Challenges Human Beings Battle Shapes Difficulty Glasses Metals

Author:Eva Rubinstein

“I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.”

Feels Humans Faces Life Is Easy Quality Reader Difficulty Worthy Variety Awe Endurance

Author:Elizabeth Strout

“To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.”

Trying Humans Happiness Highest Difficulty Strive Inner Peace Conquer Felicity Insensibility

Book:The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq

“With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.”

Humans Suffering Turns Compassion Growing Awareness Difficulty Caught Arise Bows Incarnation

Author:Jack Kornfield

“Self-pity is the most negative quality of the human spirit. Difficulties in life are intended to make us better, not bitter.”

Humans Self Spirit Quality Negative Difficulty Pity Bitter Human Spirit Self Pity

Author:Jon M. Huntsman Sr.

“We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct.... When it has come to be a hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively ... there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies ... until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.”

“The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.”

Humans Philosophy Dream Imagination Practice Dog Difficulty My Imagination Baskets Hares Human Imagination Great Imagination

Book:Keeping a Rendezvous

Source: Keeping a Rendezvous

“You know, if you're a human and living on the planet, it doesn't matter what you do; you are not immune to the challenges, the trials, the difficulty. And that fact that I happen to be a coach and a minister and a spiritual teacher doesn't mean anything. I'm still human.”

Ifs Knows Humans Mean Stills Matter Facts Happens Spiritual Challenges Teacher Planets Difficulty Coaches Trials Ministers Immune Living On Spiritual Teachers

Author:Iyanla Vanzant

“The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.”

Humans Light Human Beings Results Darkness Planets Balance Difficulty Madness Ingredients Light And Darkness Emotional Balance

Book:Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

“How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.”

Ifs Knows Needs Humans Spiritual Desire Grief Sky Perfection Difficulty Blue Plant Workers Seeds Flying Being Human Hoe

Author:Rumi

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

Source: The Wealth of Nations (illustrated)

“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is fro+m among such individuals that all human failures spring.”

Men Humans Individual Spring Difficulty Fellows Injury Not Interested Fellow Man Win Friends And Influence People

Author:Alfred Adler

“There is no telling what a human character is. Until the test comes. To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them. It may be the straight way, it may be the crooked way --- whichever it is, a man usually learns early just what he is made of.”

Men Way Humans May Made Character Faces Lines Feet Danger Tests Difficulty Crooked

Book:Taken at the flood

Source: Taken at the flood

“He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.”

Mind Humans Reason Understanding Loneliness Solitude Capable Difficulty Absolutes Spokes Sophisticated Impossibility Misunderstood Straws

Book:Man Walks Into a Room

Source: Man Walks Into a Room

“The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.”

Source: The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Source: The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations

“Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.”

Thinking Humans Human Nature Goes On Difficulty Determined Resistance Despite Encounters Wasting Time Inclination Discouraged Persevere

Author:Brother Lawrence

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

“She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.”

Humans Heart Two Different Desire Human Beings Equal Difficulty Strikes Indifference Midnight Impossibility Indication Fusion Dislocation Two Hearts Disunity

Author:Anais Nin

“Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.”

Thinking Feels Should Humans Different Moments Might Imagination Memories Human Beings Worry Fantasy Our Lives Happened Percent Empty Difficulty Shame Sticks

Author:Joko Beck

“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”

People Humans Kind Problem Dream Bigs Difficult Cities Difficulty All Kinds Abundance Being Human Settlement Big Cities

Author:Jane Jacobs

“A blessed thing it is to have a friend; one human soul whom we can trust utterly; who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in a day of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in days of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our own battle as we can.”

Source: The Works of Charles Kingsley

“I'm an optimist. I've always believed the future is going to be better than the past. And I also believe I have a role in that. The great thing about human beings, myself in particular, is that I can change. I can do better. If you can get up every day, stay optimistic, and believe the future is better than the past, those few things get you through a lot of tough times.”

“Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.”

Source: Self-culture: An address introductory to the Franklin lectures, delivered at Boston, September, 1838