Famous Quotes & Sayings

Swami Vivekananda

A perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and everything outside. Every moment we are fighting actually with external nature, and if we are defeated, our life has to go. It is, for instance, a continuous struggle for food and air. If food or air fails, we die. Life is not a simple and smoothly flowing thing, but it is a compound effect. This complex struggle between something inside and the external world is what we call life. So it is clear that when this struggle ceases, there will be an end of life.

Swami Vivekananda

There is to be found in every religion the manifestation of the struggle toward freedom. It is the groundwork of all morality, of unselfishness, which means getting rid of the idea that human beings are the same as this little body.

Ronald D. Moore

The creative part, with the writing of it and the vision, and finding the voice of a show and the characters, is much harder to teach somebody. It's like music. You can either play it or you can't. If you can't play music and you really struggle and work hard, you can learn, but you have to have some inner gift to take it to the next level.

Ron Suskind

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

Rollo May

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

Rollo May

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

Rollo May

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

Rollo May

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.

Rollo May

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

Stephen King

For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

Stephen King

Theres a constant struggle going on about how much will be illegal and how much you will be free to take. Can we open the pharmacies? Can we put Valium and Percodan and those sorts of things out on the shelves? I wouldn't take it. I don't know.

Sophie Okonedo

Im drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. Im not saying I dont love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because Im always struggling with it myself.

Solomon Northup

Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.

Taylor Swift

It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.

Stacy London

I know what it feels like to struggle with your weight, and it makes me understand why women get attached to numbers on a scale or a dress size. It doesn't mean that I have gotten over all of it myself, because I have good days and bad days just like everyone else.

Sonia Sotomayor

All judges have cases that touch our passions deeply, but we all struggle constantly with remaining impartial.

Sonia Sotomayor

The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.

Thomas Hardy

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

Tim Wise

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.

Tim Wise

And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.

Tim Cook

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.

William Wells Brown

The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.

William Wordsworth

We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.

William Saroyan

Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.

William Shatner

Mythology needs heroes and it needs villains, it needs heroes to fail, it needs heroes to struggle.

William J. Clinton

Israel's democracy is the bedrock on which our relationship stands. It's a shining example for people around the world who are on the frontline of the struggle for democracy in their own lands. Our relationship is also based on our common interest in a more stable and peaceful Middle East, a Middle East that will finally accord Israel the recognition and acceptance that its people have yearned for so long and have been too long denied, a Middle East that will know greater democracy for all its peoples.

William J. Clinton

It is dangerously destabilizing to have half the world on the cutting edge of technology while the other half struggles on the bare edge of survival.

William J. Clinton

The struggle for your own character is the struggle for the nation's character.

William James

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

William Friedkin

I believe it's true that there's good and evil in everyone and it's a constant struggle to have your better angels prevail.

Whitey Herzog

You sweat out the free agent thing in November, then you make the trades in December. Then you struggle to sign the guys left in January, and in February I get down to sewing all the new numbers on the uniforms.

Whitley Strieber

Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me...Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons ...At the very least I was going stark, raving mad.