Quotes

Quotes about Struggle


Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.

John Dryden

Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them. . . . May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets "with a lie in their right hand?" . . . Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed--have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and strunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.

Robert Louis Stevenson

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke

The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.

John Ruskin

I have always fought for ideas—until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

Margaret Anderson

Simple and brave, his faith awoke Ploughmen to struggle with their fate; Armies won battles when he spoke, And out of Chaos sprang the state.

Robert Bridges ("Droch")

It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this great faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle. . . . Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.

Rt. Hon. Jan Christiaan Smuts

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

Bernadette Devlin

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