Thoughts on Struggle from Daily Inspiration

Thoughts on Struggle

May you find inspiration in these thoughts and quotes on Struggle from my large Daily Inspiration library of inspiring quotes and inspirational words.

Today is your day to honor your being,
release each and every struggle,
gather strength from life's storms,
relax into the arms of spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The probability that we may fail
in the struggle ought not to deter us
from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
- Abraham Lincoln

One can flow harmoniously with the River -
or one can struggle fearfully against the River -
and the River just flows.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

In the struggle for survival,
the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals
because they succeed in adapting
themselves best to their environment.
- Charles Darwin

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it,
while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill.
The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation
is the same as in the life of the individual.
Pessimism kills the instinct that
urges men to struggle against poverty,
ignorance and crime, and dries up
all the fountains of joy in the world.
- Helen Keller

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...
Every step toward the goal of justice
requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle;
the tireless exertions and
passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The River of Life has no meaning, no good, no bad,
no better, no worse, no love, no hate, no fear, no anger, no joy.
The River of Life has no judgment, no expectation.
The River of Life just IS. There is nothing to do.
There is nothing to say.
There is nothing to think.
There is nothing to feel.
The River just flows. The River is the source of all nourishment -
the source of all obstacles.
The River is the source of all life - the source of all death.
The River is the source of all joy - and the source of all sorrow.
Yet the River has no joy - and the River has no sorrow.
The River is just the River.
One can flow harmoniously with the River -
or one can struggle fearfully against the River -
and the River just flows.
One can accept the River - or one can deny the River -
and the River just flows.
One can worship the River of Life - or one can curse the River of Life -
and the River just flows. There is nothing to do - and the River flows.
There is nothing to say - and the River flows.
There is nothing to think - and the River flows.
There is nothing to feel - and the River flows.
The River flows - and all else is our drama.
The River flows - and all else is our invention.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Strength does not come from winning.
Your struggles develop your strengths.
When you go through hardships
and decide not to surrender,
that is strength.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born
it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
- Margaret Mead

Often the hands will solve a mystery
that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
- Carl Jung

Most unhappiness comes from resisting life.
Occasionally, you have such a strong commitment
to changing the world order that it is worth
struggling against the flow of life.
But don't live your life as if each minor happening
were a matter of life and death.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling,
in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome
which comes out of allowing things to be as they are
without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them,
in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
- Jon Kabat-Zinn

Don't seek God in temples.
He is close to you.
He is within you.
Only you should surrender to Him
and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.
- Leo Tolstoy

Where there is unconditional love,
there is no room for unhappiness.
Whenever I look in the mirror today,
I will say to myself: "That Is The Face Of God."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Our unhappiness is triggered by either
having less than yesterday,
or having less than our neighbor.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

All unhappiness comes from either
having less than yesterday,
or from having less than one's neighbor.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I am determined to be cheerful and happy
in whatever situation I may find myself.
For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness
is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.
- Martha Washington

If anyone is unhappy, remember that
his unhappiness is his own fault...
Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility
except our own opinion.
- Epictetus

One of the greatest cause of unhappiness -
perhaps even the only cause of unhappiness - is comparison.
I remember as a young child hearing my mother say,
"Comparisons are odious."
That is one of the oldest sayings in the English language,
and one of the most important.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Life ... full of loneliness, and misery,
and suffering, and unhappiness,
and it's all over much too quickly.
- the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek,
but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ask and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
- Matthew 7:7

Lord, grant that I might not so much
seek to be loved as to love.
- St. Francis of Assisi

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- St. Francis of Assisi

Know that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown.
Seek to meet the unknown with courage and a sense of adventure.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love,
of kindness, of understanding, of peace.
Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God -
the rest will be given.
- Mother Teresa

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
- A Course In Miracles (commonly misattributed to Rumi)

In our willingness to give that which we seek,
we keep the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives.
- Deepak Chopra

The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- although attributed to St. Francis of Assisi,
this prayer first appeared (written in French) in 1912

We seek opinions that are likely to
support what we want to be true.
- Thomas Gilovich

All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony.
Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
- Rumi

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We travel, some of us forever, to seek
other states, other lives, other souls.
- Anais Nin

The essence of being human is that one
does not seek perfection.
- George Orwell

Do not seek to bring things to pass
in accordance with your wishes,
but wish for them as they are,
and you will find them.
- Epictetus

I constantly seek excellence
in all domains that truly matter to me.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Seek always to do some good, somewhere.
Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth.
You must give some time to your fellow man.
For remember, you don't live in a world all your own.
Your brothers are here too.
- Albert Schweitzer

We live in a wonderful world that is
full of beauty, charm and adventure.
There is no end to the adventures that we can have
if only we seek them with our eyes open.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

While the laughter of joy is in
full harmony with our deeper life,
the laughter of amusement
should be kept apart from it.
The danger is too great of thus learning
to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery,
and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
- Lewis Carroll

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind
a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.
Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.
Your mind will seek to develop the picture...
Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
- Norman Vincent Peale

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience,
something that never has been and never could
have been experienced by anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell

To love. To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence
and the vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated
or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try to understand.
To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
- Arundhati Roy

Once you have seen the truth
you must make the decision to let go
of the pain, anger, and resentment you have been holding on to.
This requires you to take action.
If you are attached to your pain, resentment,
and self-righteousness, and addicted to your emotional reactions,
this will be a difficult step for you.
Taking action requires letting go of the very thing
you have been holding on to for so many years.
There is comfort in what we find familiar,
even if we are experiencing pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering itself becomes the familiarity we seek.
It takes absolute faith in yourself
plus courage, will, and discipline to let go.
But once you let go, it will be as if
the weight of the world has been taken off your shoulders.
In this process it is important to forgive
not just the others in our lives, but also ourselves.
For most people, giving ourselves
the gift of forgiveness is very challenging.
- Sheri Rosenthal

We fear the unknown,
perhaps more than we fear anything else,
and yet we are, at heart, adventurers.
We seek to expand our realm of knowledge and dominion.
Perhaps we are attempting to overcome and crush the unknown,
but our duel with the unknown is such a one-sided clash
that we must know in our hearts
that our adventure is no more than a child's game.
Perhaps we hope that the unknown
is like the darkness of a cave
and that the brief light of our adventurer's candle
can illuminate the entire cave.
Nonetheless, the path of the adventurer
is a path of joy, while the way of fear is one of suffering.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Do not seek the because -
in love there is no because,
no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
- Anais Nin

The unknown is like the darkness of a cave -
it can be illuminated by the brief light
of one adventurer's small candle.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The challenge before us is to savor the unknown
and delight in the taste of possibility.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

A single event can awaken a stranger totally unknown to us.
To live is to be slowly born.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

What if it were only an illusion?
Perhaps life is not as threatening as it appears.
Perhaps the greatest threat to our serenity
is our fear of the future -
our fear of the unknown.
Perhaps, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said,
"The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past
have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
- George S. Patton

The most painful and debilitating fear is fear of the unknown.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Faith:
When you walk to the edge of all the light you have
and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown,
you must believe that one of two things will happen:
...
There will be something solid for you to stand upon,
or, you will be taught how to fly
- Patrick Overton - from his book of poems: The Leaning Tree, 1975
[Widely mis-attributed to Barbara J. Winter, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and others]

We all have an instinctive fear of the unseen.
Make a conscious effort to discover
and embrace the unfamiliar -
to view the unknown not as a lurking monster,
but as a glorious adventure.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The greatest battle of all is simply... Life.
This is no child's game. This is the big one -
the Super Bowl - the Game of all games.
The rules of Life are unwritten and unknown.
Perhaps, one could say that there are no rules.
The Judge has ultimate power.
She can call the game at any time - for any reason.
The penalties in the Game are completely arbitrary -
in both timing and severity.
Penalty for what, we ask?
The Judge is silent.
How can I win the Game?
"You can never win," comes the answer,
"So just take pleasure in playing the Game."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I honor you, Hero, for you do not play to the crowd.
You play to your own soul.
An audience of one fills the house with its appreciation and applause.
Others follow you, and may attempt to emulate you,
but that is not why you are a hero.
Fame may smile upon you, or it may not.
The world may cheer your name, or you may be the unknown warrior
who rescued comrades in battle,
or taught a young girl how to shed tears of joy.
Whatever you did, you did not do for fame.
If you had, you would not be a Hero.
You are a Hero for your bold courageous inspired action.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Fear of the unknown is
the greatest fear of humankind,
and death the greatest unknown.
Acknowledging these doubts and the fears
is a powerful beginning.
It is liberating to say,
"Yes, I don't know, and yes, I am afraid."
Beyond that, the path to happiness
lies in living in the moment -
enjoying what you are doing today.
You don't need a reason to be happy,
just a choice.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Life is a song - sing it.
Life is a game - play it.
Life is a challenge - meet it.
Life is a dream - realize it.
Life is a sacrifice - offer it.
Life is love - enjoy it.
- Sai Baba

Be curious; be adventurous; live life full-out.
Accept the challenge, and reach for the brass ring.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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