Difficulty Quotes - Page 5

• Difficulty is a nurse of greatness-a harsh nurse, who rocks her foster children roughly, but rocks them in strength and athletic proportion. The mind, grappling with great aims and wrestling with mighty impediments, grows by a certain necessity to the stature of greatness.

  Kobe Bryant

  Children, Wrestling, Greatness

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• Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Heart, Decision, Weakness

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• One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Artist, Enemy, Should

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• It's no easy matter to paint a background. I venture to say that the old painters had more difficulty with their grounds than with their figures. You know the story of Vandyke brought to Rubens with this recommendation: 'He already knows how to paint a background.' 'That is more than I can do!' was the reply.

  William Morris Hunt

  Venture, Matter, Stories

  William Morris Hunt (1976). “William Morris Hunt on painting and drawing”, Dover Pubns

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• You have it in your power to make your days on Earth a path of flowers, instead of a path of thorns.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Flower, Path, Earth

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• The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

  Emile Zola

  Legs, Crutches, Lourdes

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• My difficulties belong to me!

  Alfred Adler

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• The contour eludes me.

  Paul Cezanne

  Elude

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• To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Thinking, Easy, Threshold

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (1824). “Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels”, p.75

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• Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Persistence, Concentration

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• The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

  Paul Bettany

  Beautiful, Moral, Natural

  "Paul Bettany: Playing Darwin with Creation". Interview with Adam Rutherford, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2009.

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• The virtue of obedience makes the will supple... It inspires the courage with which to fulfill the most difficult tasks.

  John Vianney

  Inspire, Tasks, Virtue

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• The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

  M. Scott Peck

  Inspirational, Happiness, Spiritual

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• Once you realize that it is impossible to capture the character of the various manifestations of nature by pictorial means, and that an interpretation based on imagination is equally erroneous, you will not find yourself facing a gaping void as you might have feared.

  Frantisek Kupka

  Character, Mean, Imagination

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• Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Dark, White, Half

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• I have had to learn the simplest things
  last. Which made for difficulties.

  Charles Olson

  Lasts, Made, Simplest

  Charles Olson (1993). “Selected Poems of Charles Olson”, p.101, Univ of California Press

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• Great leadership does not mean running away from reality. Sometimes the hard truths might just demoralize the company, but at other times sharing difficulties can inspire people to take action that will make the situation better.

  John P. Kotter

  Leadership, Running, Inspiration

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• I have a great deal of difficulty with those who live in a hugely prosperous country telling people in the developing world that they should be deprived of a critical source of energy.

  Lee R. Raymond

  Country, People, Energy

  "Ethics, Enterprise, and the Multinational Corporation". Religion & Liberty Journal Interview, acton.org. July 20, 2010.

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• The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

  Adrienne Rich

  Song, Art, Struggle

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

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• For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

  Sergei Eisenstein

  Color, Example, Cinema

  Sergei Eisenstein (2014). “Film Form: Essays in Film Theory”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Happiness, Success, Men

  Spurgeon, Charles H. (2015). “The Complete Works of Charles Spurgeon, Volume 86: The Sword and the Trowel, Volume 7”, p.420, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• It's enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience.

  Claude Monet

  Crazy, Weather, Atmosphere

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• I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

  Dr. Seuss

  Life, Positive, Success

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• Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Literature, Possibility, Complexity

  1950 The Liberal Imagination, preface.

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• Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.

  Don Marquis

  Funny, Hope, Witty

  Don Marquis (2012). “Archy and Mehitabel”, p.54, Anchor

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