Quotations

“To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference.”

Treating the decision to make an effort as a victory in itself · Speech, Birmingham and Midland Institute, 6 January 1870

Charles Dickens

“Whatever may be said to the contrary by others, to me life has been a battle-field, and I believe always will be; but is the soldier necessarily unhappy because he is fighting?”

Separating struggle from unhappiness and finding purpose within difficulty · Letter to Mrs. Condict, 7 November 1875

Elizabeth Prentiss

“These are the times that try men's souls.”

Calling for courage and steadfastness during a period of national crisis · The American Crisis, no. 1

Thomas Paine

“There is success in all honest endeavour, and there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made.”

Finding genuine achievement in sincere effort even without first prize · Speech, Birmingham and Midland Institute, 6 January 1870

Charles Dickens

“Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness—a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion.”

Presenting hardship as a severe but formative teacher · Speech at a New York press banquet, 15 December 1851

William Cullen Bryant

“Man has no greater enemy than himself.”

Original: Nullum homini maius hostem quam se ipsum. — A moral commonplace of his dialogues on fortune: we thwart our own intentions. · De remediis utriusque fortunae, Book II (Latin)

Francesco Petrarca

“Difficulty is as needful to appreciation as labour is to existence.”

Suggesting that effort and obstacles deepen our sense of value · Essay, The Female Portrait Gallery: Miss Wardour

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“It is in times of struggle that character is truly revealed and tempered.”

Original: Det er i kampens stund at karakteren virkelig åpenbares og herdes. — Reflects on adversity as the ultimate test of human character · Public address (Norwegian)

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

“The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the world is such, that to attempt to serve it one must have the constancy of a martyr.”

Portraying literary life as an exhausting struggle with public judgement · Preface to The Works of Alexander Pope, 1717

Alexander Pope

“The conclusion of the whole matter — a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.”

An early expression of the pessimism that would remain closely associated with Dowson's outlook · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

Ernest Dowson

“As long as there is struggle, resistance and hope, I am unwounded.”

Original: Póki walki, póki oporu, póki nadziei, póty ja jestem nieranny. — Struggle itself becomes a source of resilience and protection against defeat. · Letter to his mother, 14 May 1844 (Polish)

Juliusz Słowacki

“Literature is the recording of the human spirit in its eternal struggle to express the unutterable.”

Capturing the core purpose of literary expression as a bridge to deep human experience · Critical essay

Herbert Gorman

“I have always had, alas, too much of that swift, disastrous & suicidal energy which destroyed our dear & incomparable Verlaine.”

Dowson recognising in himself something of the destructive intensity he associated with Verlaine · Letter to Arthur Symons, 5 July 1896

Ernest Dowson

“I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could.”

Revealing the burden as well as the fascination of Yeats's occult convictions · Essay, Magic

William Butler Yeats

“Negro poetic expression hovers for the moment, pardonably perhaps, over the race problem, but its highest allegiance is to Poetry—it must soar.”

Arguing that poetry can arise from social struggle while aspiring beyond immediate circumstance · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

William Stanley Braithwaite

“It is the struggle to be patient and gentle and cheerful, when pressed down and worn upon and distracted, that costs us so much.”

Recognising that character is tested most severely under exhaustion and pressure · Letter to Mrs. Stearns, 17 February 1849

Elizabeth Prentiss

“I have been wrestling with an angel and a devil during the past two months. And it is indeed terrible to be between two powers so different.”

Creation described as a fight on two fronts · Letter to James Oppenheim, circa 1916

Kahlil Gibran

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

Framing liberation as the achievement of an undivided and fully recognised self. · The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

“Taking sides always offers security, reassurance, support. But those who suffer most deeply are those who stand amid the struggle, whose more sensitive conscience cannot take sides unconditionally.”

Original: Partei ist immer Sicherung, Beruhigung, Rückhalt. Aber die am tiefsten Leidenden sind diejenigen, die inmitten des Kampfes stehen, und deren sensibleres Gewissen es doch nicht vermag, bedinglos Partei zu nehmen. — Captures the moral difficulty of belonging in a region divided between competing national identities · Review concerning Hans Karl Abel's Die Elsässische Tragödie, 1911 (German)

Ernst Stadler

“We're like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made the father such a man.”

Reflecting on the paradox that prosperity can remove the difficulties through which character was formed · Television interview, Meet the Press, 22 March 1959

Robert Frost

“He must win the battle of life with his own hand, and with his own eyes.”

Emphasising the artist's dependence on personal skill, perception and effort · Speech, Artists' General Benevolent Institution, London, 29 March 1862