Quotes about Struggle

Take all we have, only give us peace'? In God's name…let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

Bonhoeffer had always struggled with the "problem" of being charming. He mistrusted it and wanted the words and logic of what he said to be the only things to which others responded.

One knows what is right, but holds it at arm's length for a time, neither throwing it out, nor embracing it.

This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton's famous phrase, it is "darkness visible," a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.

Wilberforce is having thoughts now that seem utterly strange and foreign.

What he needed desperately was someone to whom he might unburden himself, someone who would understand and know what to do, someone with the wisdom to remind him of what he needed to be reminded of just now—of God's grace—of the upside of God's love.

All right," he wrote, "if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ."

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.

This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.

To be human is to be beautifully flawed

Sometimes all we can do is trust that hardship is a path to peace.