Quotes about Struggle

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

My flesh and blood...when it rises against me, is not my flesh and blood. I discard it.

Ah, that 'if.' But it's of no use to despond. I can but do that, when I have tried everything and failed, and even then it won't serve me much.

All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that many as blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be.

It is not often," said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, "that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?

if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found ... and [those who rule] strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk ... In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years.

Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed

I want," said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, "to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?

There are dark shadows on earth, but the lights are always brighter.

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.