Struggle Quotes

I am part of the load not rightly balanced . . .

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

I'm starting to cry. I'm remembering those years I struggled with my weight, those times when I saw my reflection in a store window and didn't know who that fat person was, years when it was a big accomplishment for me to exercise at two dots on the StairMaster. And now I'm finishing a 26-mile race. Damn! This is better than winning an Emmy!

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me.

Freedom battles are not fought without paying heavy prices.

We may stumble and fall but shall rise again; it should be enough if we did not run away from the battle.

They do say that when a man starts down hill everybody is ready to help him with a kick, and I suppose it is so.

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?

Strugglin' and striving, that's how the dough come.

The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. When 'Help' came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it's just a fast rock 'n roll song. I didn't realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help.

The strenuous life tastes better

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.

The daily struggle does not arise from a purpose or a program, but from an immediate need.

It's hard to fight when the fight ain't fair.

A political movement must keep in touch with reality and the prevailing conditions. Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables, and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.

Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.

Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

Fight to the last gasp.

Nothing's ever easy as long as you go on living.

Every day was a struggle. Forget making plans for life - we were just trying to make it to next week.

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm.

We are weakened and we are tired, but we are not done yet.

Nations are born out of travail and suffering

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.

On my tombstone it will say: 'I tried everything - nothing was easy.'

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.

I can't give up. It's a rap thang. And I ain't goin back to the crack game.

If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

Be not in despair, the way is very difficult, like walking on the edge of a razor; yet despair not, arise, awake, and find the ideal, the goal.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Gnawing with my teeth my bonds in sunder, I gain'd my freedom.

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

I got my first break and became a singing waiter at eighteen or nineteen. I couldn't make a living at it. I quit. Then I got married and sold aluminum siding. My wife had problems physically. It was not good.

I'm trying to find myself. Sometimes it's not that easy.

The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.

Still humping the American Dream

In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.

We must be warriors in the struggle against ignorance

It is the patient building of character, the intense struggle to realize the truth, which alone will tell in the future of humanity.

The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

The longer I live the more I think of the quality of fortitude... men who fall, pick themselves up and stumble on, fall again, and are trying to get back up when they die.

We began a contest for liberty ill provided with the means for the war, relying on our patriotism to supply the deficiency. We expected to encounter many wants and distressed we must bear the present evils and fortitude

The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.