Quotes about Struggle

We probably will never be free from all our hostilities, and there even may be days and weeks in which our hostile feelings dominate our emotional life to such a degree that the best thing we can do is to keep distance, speak little to others and not write letters, except to ourselves.

Truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it.

It was hard for me to see God at work in my life when I was running from class to class and traveling from place to place.

Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter — the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.

Why do we children of the light so easily become conspirators with the darkness? The answer is quite simple. Our identity, our sense of self, is at stake.

It is far from easy to believe that this is true. Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves.

I've yet to meet anyone who has come closer to Jesus by forsaking the church.

The problem, however, is that we not only want our freedom but also fear it.

There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.

The great temptation of our lives is to deny our role as chosen people and to allow ourselves to be trapped in the worries of our daily lives. Without the word that keeps lifting us up as God's chosen people, we remain, or become, small people, stuck in the complaints that emerge from our daily struggle to survive.

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.

I looked at the splendid drawings and paintings Rembrandt created in the midst of all his setbacks, disillusionment and grief. One must have died many deaths and cried many tears to have painted a portrait of God in such humility.