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Difficulty Quotes

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Difficulty Quotes

“[N]either in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

“Is there any man that thinks in chains like the man who calls himself a free-thinker? Is there any man so credulous as the man who will not believe in the Bible? He swallows a ton of difficulties, and yet complains that we have swallowed an ounce of them. He has much more need of faith of a certain sort than we have, for skepticism has far harder problems than faith.”

“A healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk.”

“I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.”

“I think I'm up for not trying to play a literary heroine. I think I'd rather just do someone that has just been created in a script, rather than in a book that everyone knows and loves. The difficulty with it and the reason these characters are so loved is that every woman and man that reads it understands it in a different way. They're so relatable, but different aspects will be drawn from different people.”

“In my formative years the people who influenced me most were the Christian existentialists, I mean men like Munier and Kierkegaard and perhaps most of all Nicholas Berdyaev and in my travels I looked for one thing more than anything. I rarely discussed, probably mainly because of language difficulties, metaphysics with the various religious people of other groups I'd meet with. But I'd very much try to see how they were incarnated, how their particular soul was incarnated or took roots into reality.”

“If you've got a great crew it's intense, but its quite short. 'The Elephant Man' was longer than most, for an independent film. That was a 14 week film. But it was because of the intrinsic difficulties. We had to invent a different way of filming, because the makeup was so long. A working day for me with a full makeup on was nineteen hours. So obviously you couldn't do that twice running.”

“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”

“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.”

“Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.”

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.”

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”

“If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.”

“There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”

“There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed. ... These things are so ancient within us that they're ground into each separate cell of our bodies... It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”

“There’s something about her—Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling—terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits—or if she has any, she hasn’t found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything.”

“I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.”

“The gem cannot be polished without friction nor man without trials.”

“Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.”