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1 " But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved. "
― Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 " Your call will become clear as as your mind is transformed by the reading of Scripture and the internal work of God's Spirit. The Lord never hides His will from us. In time, as you obey the call first to follow, your destiny will unfold before you. The difficulty will lie in keeping other concerns from diverting your attention. "
― Charles R. Swindoll
3 " This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the way to life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. Better, though difficult, the right way to go, Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe. "
― John Bunyan , The Pilgrim's Progress
4 " Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories
5 " That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians. "
― Ernest Hemingway , For Whom the Bell Tolls
6 " I sometimes think you despise poetry,' said Phineas. 'When it is false I do. The difficulty is to know when it is false and when it is true. "
― Anthony Trollope , Phineas Finn (Palliser, #2)
7 " This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age. "
― Louis Zukofsky , Collected Fiction
8 " I think the difficulty lies in the immeasurable vanity of the human adult, particularly the pedagogical adult,… which does not permit him to recognize as good any tendency in children to fly in the face of his conceptions of a correct human being; to recognize that may be here is something highly desirable, to be encourage, rather than destroyed as pernicious…. [Y]our teacher has usually well-defined conceptions of what men and women have to be. And if a boy is too lively, too noisy, too restless, too curious, to suit the concept, he must be trimmed and subdued. "
― Voltairine de Cleyre , The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader
9 " I moved to assist, but never got the chance. there was some pretty violent banging for a minute, and then a tearing sound. Finally the stall door flew open, and Ray's shirtless body emerged and started bitch-slapping everything in sight.His aim was off, probably due to the difficulty of having his eyes on the other side of the room, but he made up for it with sheer determination. "
― Karen Chance , Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)
10 " She had learnt many things since the days of her first rebellion, and she knew now that this matter of the man friend and nothing else in the world is the central issue in the emancipation of women. The difficulty of him is latent in every other restriction of which women complain. The complete emancipation of women will come with complete emancipation of humanity from jealousy — and no sooner. All other emancipations are shams until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and nothing remains for emancipation when she can. "
― H.G. Wells , The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
11 " Perhaps the difficulty in measuring Change Management is that the very thing we are measuring is changing. "
― Pearl Zhu , Change Insight: Change as an Ongoing Capability to Fuel Digital Transformation
12 " ...he talked quite naturally while we ate — about the difficulty of finding words to describe the luminous mist, and why one has the desire to describe beauty." Perhaps it's an attempt to possess it," I said." Or be possessed by it; perhaps that's the same thing, really. I suppose it's the complete identification with beauty one's seeking." The mist grew brighter and brighter. "
13 " Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity "
14 " If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion. "
― Arthur Quiller-Couch
15 " The longer a life, the challenge is not the distance between destinations, but the difficulty of travelling light. My soul’s a portmanteau packed full, one half filled with what was, the other with what is, what should be. "
― Jamie A. Hughes
16 " by the late fifth century, the identities of those excluded from full personhood—women, slaves, barbarians—are being increasingly understood in terms of the difficulty or impossibility of mastering the daemonic tendencies in their bodies, while the identities of free men grow more dependent on their capacity for keeping the body under control. "
― , The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece
17 " I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured. "
― Alfred Hayes , In Love
18 " While the government is " studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.(pg.87, " Think Little" ) "
19 " I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. "
― Bill Bryson , A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
20 " They are married, after all, in every way that matters. The difficulty is that they appear not to have noticed. And one is somewhat wary, given the history, of bringing that fact to their attention. "
― Chris Dee , Polishing Silver: The Journal of Alfred Pennyworth