It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Mickey Rourke’s character in ‚The Wrestler‘ – that was my dad, that was my uncles, that was so many members of my family. It was the only thing they knew. And then they would end up wrestling for a hundred bucks, go to autograph signings for two hundred bucks.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.

I can’t do nothing just a little.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

The more nobly a man wills and acts, the more avid he becomes for great and sublime aims to pursue. He will no longer be content with family, country, and the remunerative aspect of his work. He will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

‚American Graffiti‘ was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.

Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

My life is a struggle.

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Life is warfare.

There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

There’s many ups and downs in the fight game.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

There’s always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

One of the great strengths of the United States is… we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

I feel impressed to counsel those engaged in personal challenges to do right. In particular, my heart reaches out to those who feel discouraged by the magnitude of their struggle.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them – neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‚This is what I asked for.‘

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.

If you stop struggling, then you stop life.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

What nourishes me also destroys me.