Quotes About Things That Are Hard

“Those things we stuff, try so hard to ignore, they are the very things begging for release
the things that hold the promise of hope, the flame of freedom.”

— Jo Ann Fore

“Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.”

— Joseph Bruchac

“It's about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”

— Gretchen Rubin

“Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?" asked Milo politely.
"You could," said Alec, "but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does."
Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in the air next to Alex Bings. He looked around very quickly and, an instant later, crashed back down to the earth again.
"Interesting, wasn't it?" asked Alex.
"Yes, it was," agreed Milo, rubbing his head and dusting himself off, "but I think I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall.”

— Norton Juster

“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else ...”

— Lucy Grealy

“People in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say,'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.'Or they can be in negative sentiment override, said that even a relatively new tool thing that a partner says get perceived as negative. In negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change their states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.”

— John Gottberg

“They just change. Their body changes. Their abilities - the things they do that make them who they are - leave, sometimes temporarily, sometimes forever. Every day they wake up with that big what if?
And nothing is scarier than a life filled with what ifs - living by day without predictability and control. Some people end up losing feeling. Some have uncontrollable spasms. Some can't function. Some end up blind or in a wheelchair. Some end up bedridden and paralyzed.
It's hard to know who "some people" will be.”

— Lindsey Leavitt

“Be thankful for the simple things and God's love and you will never be disappointed when life gets hard.”

— Phil Mitchell

“The mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in US political life. Is this the really maddening question for anyone else sitting out here watching it all? Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can't just be 9/11; it predates 9/11. But since just when has the right been so energized? Has there really been some reactionary Silent Majority out there for decades, frustrated but atomized, waiting for an inciting spark? If so, was Ronald Reagan that spark? But there wasn't this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich's rise to Speaker, or with the intoxicating hatred of all things Clinton? Or has the country as a whole just somehow moved so far right that hard-core conservatism now feeds, stormlike, on the hot vortical energy of the mainstream?”

— David Foster Wallace

“Maybe it was a stupid exercise, and you couldn't grow things in winter. But there was something I liked about he idea of those seeds, buried so deep, having at least a chance to emerge. Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked so hard, all alone, to grow.”

— Sarah Dessen

“There are things in life that happen that change who we are, things that are hard to come back from, and in the end we never really are the same.”

— Jessica Sorensen

“I almost always have a strong passion about the things I do. I wouldn't say aggressive, but I am always trying very hard to make sure that things will succeed.”

— Pansy Ho

“Not all things will be easy for you, Bailey. It's the hard things that grow us. If you need to get stronger as a performer, then you'll get stronger.”

— Karen Kingsbury

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”

— Dorothy Day

“Having a thick skin doesn't mean that you're hard or harsh. I was lucky because I was born with a thick skin. That doesn't mean that things don't bother me, but you have to keep it in perspective.”

— Shelley Moore Capito

“Joy being of God was a living thing, a fountain not a cistern, one of those divine things that are possessed only as they overflow and flow away, and not easily come by because it must break into human life through the hard crust of sin and contingency. Joy came now here, now there, was held and escaped.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

“I like normal stuff people fear - like spiders and heights. I'm frightened by the unknown, by things that are hard to figure out and get a grip on.”

— Haley Joel Osment

“I never felt hard done by and never wanted for anything, but I grew up in a wealthy area where I saw people being handed things on a plate. So it made me want to earn some money and be able to buy things for myself.”

— Holly Valance

“They were made of small hard things-aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost dynasties of African antiquity.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.”

— Matt Mullenweg

“That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Way back when the Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: "Why in the world do you have to show so much blood all over the place?" She was pretty worked up about it. One of the actors, Ernest Borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. "Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?" This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War.
I love that line. That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I believe that life is hard. That we all are going to walk through things that are hard and challenging, and yet advertising wants us to believe that it's all easy.”

— Jamie Lee Curtis

“When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.”

— James Howard Kunstler

“Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things.”

— Jim Woodring

“As I said, my parents loved that when they came to America, if you worked hard, the only things that could stop you were the limits you placed on yourself.”

— Nikki Haley

“If a book is made up of things that are hard to believe, then we were like something out of a book.”

— Brock Clarke

“I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own-hard for me, at least.”

— Gene Wolfe

“We clearly see in God's Word that anything He tells us to do, He will give us the ability to do it. But do we really believe it? Do we want to believe it? It's easier to come up with excuses for why we can't do things that are hard or that we really don't want to do.”

— Joyce Meyer

“Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.”

— Miriam Toews

“If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.”

— Daniel Kahneman

“A lot of things we're supposed to do are hard to do, but we can do them. They're always beneficial. Really, some things that are hard are beneficial.”

— Victoria Osteen

“As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies.”

— Mike Nichols

“It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.”

— Douglas Coupland

“Take a hard look at those things, which we needlessly turn into burdens, when they were meant to be blessings.”

— Elaine A. Cannon

“Enough! we're tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly The hard types of the mason's knife, As Heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're tired, my heart and I ... In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out: Disdain them, break them, throw them by! And if before the days grew rough We once were loved, used, - well enough, I think, we've fared, my heart and I.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“What's the point of opening yourself up to your friends if they don't notice you in your vulnerable state? The point of it all is to love friends completely and utterly, at their best and worst, and to love more than just the good things. It's about showing that you're willing to accept them for whatever they are, that they should not feel insecure or self-conscious in your presence, which can be a hard task to achieve.”

— Esther Earl

“On the very last day of shooting [of The Last King of Scotlang], I remember wanting to get the [Idi Amin] character out of me right away, as much as I could. You literally take a bath to wash him off you. Luckily, I went into another part not so long afterwards, so I was kind of able to push it away a little bit. But speech patterns, and little sounds, particularly colloquial things, like the way you ask questions or might respond, were sticking with me, probably because I'd worked so hard to make it a part of my everyday way of expressing myself.”

— Forest Whitaker

“If you are the leader, you don't have the right to say things like "Ugh, didn't eat this week I was so busy." "Haven't slept." I look sideways at those signs of bravado, which are intended to make one feel that the person is working so hard. I don't think that way.”

— Scott Raab

“There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”

— Bryan Stevenson

“It's too easy to give up on the things that are hard to accomplish.”

— C. R. Johnson

“The deadlift also serves as a way to train the mind to do things that are hard.”

— Mark Rippetoe

“I know that isn't always easy and that there is self-harm in the world. Sometimes it's hard for people to rise above things.”

— Andy Biersack

“Your life's course will not be determined by doing the things that you are certain you can do. Those are the easy things. It will be determined by whether you try the things that are hard.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

“Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?”

— Andy Warhol

“There are two things that are hard to hit and see. That's a spooky ghost and Muhammad Ali.”

— Muhammad Ali

“While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It's a burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears; humbling defeats and exhausting victories.”

— Timothy Keller

“Chances are that any helpful two-year-old will break some eggs. We are often not very good at things when we are new. But there may be an important choice to make at such moments. Do we support and protect the innate wish to be of help to others in our children, or do we protect the eggs? Hard as it seems, the greater mother wisdom may lie in a willingness to clean up broken eggs or replace a mitten and a box of crayons.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen

“Children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.”

— Clayton Christensen

“I'm a strong believer that you have to have an equal opportunity to fail and to try things that are hard. I always tell my students, "Don't just take things that are easy for you. If you're really good at math, don't take just math. Take classes that make you write. If you're a really great writer, but bad at math, take math and make yourself work your way through it."”

— Condoleezza Rice