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1 " Sometimes a little discomfort in the beginning can save a whole lot of pain down the road. "
― Wendelin Van Draanen , Flipped
2 " Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regime or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego's will to prevail. To listen to your soul is to stop fighting with life--to stop fighting when things fall apart; when they don't go our away, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty and to wait. "
3 " The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. "
4 " She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. "
― E.M. Forster , A Room with a View
5 " I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. "
― Carl Sagan , The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
6 " Most of the truly kind people of this world show some measure of discomfort when offered kindness. Their gratitude stems not only from their understanding of the depth of the force of kindness, but also from their conviction that kindness should not be taken for granted. "
― , The Girl on the Trail
7 " Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. "
― Robert Wright , Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
8 " Happiness fades by design, precisely because it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. We continually need to meet our psychological, emotional, and physical needs to remain healthy. If one meal were enough to provide lasting happiness, we would slowly starve to death afterward … Consequently, there’s a limit to our happiness, which is defined by the amount required to satisfy a biological need. Exceed this amount, and the result isn’t more happiness but the discomfort and disease that follow from overindulgence. While some may be good, more isn’t necessarily better, and too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. "
9 " It is very difficult to convince a person to come out of his conservative shell, unless he feels discomfort there. "
― Tarif Naaz
10 " We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
11 " It is very difficult to convince a person to come out of his conversative shell, unless he doesn't feel discomfort there. "
12 " When it comes to purpose and preparation, most of us want to skip the preparation part and get right to purpose, which is why we don't always get to truly enjoy and walk in our purpose. Don't despise the discomfort in preparation. It's the set-up for a firm foundation. Preparation ultimately ensures that we don't squander purpose. "
― Andrena Sawyer
13 " There comes a time in some relationships when no matter how sincere the attempt to reconcile the differences or how strong the wish to recreate a part of the past once shared, the struggle becomes so painful that nothing else is felt and the world and all its beauty only add to the discomfort by providing cruel contrast. "
― Leo F. Buscaglia , Loving Each Other
14 " When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think abut a dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss' plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in economic history. "
― Steven Pinker , The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
15 " Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books.So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading. "
― Junot Díaz
16 " If you want to be successful, put yourself in a discomfort zone. "
17 " When we can accept reality as it is and are okay with it without needing to change it, we then can begin to take steps toward creating a brighter reality for ourselves and others, coming from a place of understanding. But when we are motivated to change reality due to our discomfort with it, we do not think clearly. The reason that there is so much suffering in the world is because people are too busy judging everyone and everything, and through the judgments they perpetuate the suffering. People are so focused on changing outside conditions, all the while forgetting the judgment and separation within their own heart. "
― Alaric Hutchinson , Living Peace: Essential Teachings for Enriching Life
18 " Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. (" Fish for silence." ) "
19 " She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained. "
― Kate Morton , The Forgotten Garden
20 " It is better to experience temporary discomfort to achieve the dream, than permanent comfort without any fulfillment. "
― Lailah Gifty Akita