Struggle for life

“ If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being. And this is tragedy. ”

“ MacNaghten? Would you toil, and slave, and fag,—would you shut out the sun, that your daily labor should have no suggestive temptings to enjoyment,—would you satisfy yourself that the world should be to you one everlasting struggle, till at last the very capacity to feel it otherwise was lost to you forever? ”

“ Looking at the turmoil of life, we find all occupied with its want and misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless needs and avert manifold suffering, without daring to expect anything else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual existence, full of want and misery, toil and moil, strife and struggle, sorrow and trouble, anguish and fear—from the cradle to the grave. ”

“ It is the struggle for existence, the “battle of life,” which exercises the moral faculties and calls forth the latent sparks of genius. The hope of gain, the love of power, the desire of fame and approbation, excite to noble deeds, and call into action all those faculties which are the distinctive attributes of man. ”

“ In the stress of daily life, we are sometimes tempted to lose heart, and cry, "Who shall show us any good for all this toil and watch and struggle?"—but in calmer moments, looking back over the Difficult Hills, we cannot fail to see that we have gained ground. The sacredness of humanity is gradually overtopping the prerogatives of class. ”

“ I have seen young men going about, dallying with this or that pleasure, physically lazy, mentally indolent, morally indifferent, burdened with ennui, aimless, making no struggle. Will power must be awakened, life given to the mechanism, or it will go to rust and decay. While there is hope there is life. When interest is gone, the mind and spirit are dead, and the body is dying. ”

“ Suffering, struggle, work, and death are raised as objections against life, they make life questionable, unnatural—something that must cease, and for which one not only requires but also has—remedies! ”

“ He who weakly shrinks from the struggle, who will offer no resistance, who will endure no labor nor fatigue, can neither fulfill his own vocation, nor contribute aught to the general welfare of mankind. ”

“ Look on these two pictures—the life of the masses, one long, dull record of struggle and effort entirely devoted to the petty interests of personal welfare, to misery in all its forms, a life beset by intolerable boredom as soon as ever those aims are satisfied and the man is thrown back upon himself, whence he can be roused again to some sort of movement only by the wild fire of passion. ”

“ These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's Ascent of Man, 1894. Even the title was a happy and suggestive one. Struggle for life is a fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is balanced by the struggle for the life of others. ”

“ We struggle for our livelihoods, and for all that makes life worth living in the material sense, and not the less are we called upon to struggle with an army of spiritual woes and fears, which now we vanquish and now are vanquished by. ”

“ They must toil, toil on, without hope, without relaxing their daily efforts, or without once daring to entertain the idea that, by a long continuance in honest, virtuous, industrious conduct, the day [Pg 133] might come when, like the great Creator of all, they might rest from their labours, and behold peaceful ease succeeding the hard-griping hand of poverty. Think of a whole life passed thus, in one continued struggle for the bare means of life, without a glimmer of hope to cheer the thorny path. What must such a life be like? ”

“ Hence the antagonisms that arise at every point of human contact. The sum of these antagonisms is what we call the struggle of life, which is merely the struggle of each to survive at the expense of his fellows, and is therefore barbaric. ”

“ And this continued denial of wants, of needs, occasionally, hardened him, as his earlier experiences had hardened him, toughened him for the struggles to come, brought to him that which is good for all youth–realization that life is not a mere span 48 of days with sweets and comforts for the asking, but a time of struggle, a battle for supremacy, and it is only through the battle that one grows fit and ever more fit for the good of the All. ”

“ But in view of the bigger things of life, the tremendous struggle going on so near, the agony of the sick and wounded, the suffering of the women and children, my own little qualms get lost in the shuffle, and my one consuming desire is to help in any way I can. ”

“ What would they think—those three hundred speech-tired boys—if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life—its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes—and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with one's strength. ”

“ It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life. ”

“ Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot. ”

“ They thought him quarrelsome, vain, untutored in the forms of civilized life which teach men to ignore much, to endure more, and to reserve the stake of personal feeling and personal struggle for the last and highest emergencies. ”

“ Is life worth the gigantic struggle to overcome the 58 perplexing difficulties and endeavor to live honest and clean and not slip down the path of despair where the great majority seem to be going. I say it is! ”

“ that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. ”

“ Costly as that struggle was in pains, sicknesses, tortures, anguish, physical exhaustions, domestic distresses, social alienations, church discords, languishments in prison, fears, frenzies, and even life, the price may not have been high for the wide-spread and abiding blessings of mental freedom which it obtained. ”

“ Why say, with so much bitterness, that in this world, constituted as it is, there is no air for all lungs, no employment for all minds? Is there not opportunity for calm and serious study? and is not that a refuge, a hope, a field within the reach of all of us? With it, evil days are passed over without their weight being felt; every one can make his own destiny; every one can employ his life nobly. ”

“ Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. ”

“ Human life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil like the rest. ”

“ It is chained down to the earth by the influence of one great and constant occupation—that of providing the means of its mortal existence. When it shows itself shook and agitated, or overcome in the struggle, what ought to be the thoughts and feelings of the wise for poor humanity! ”

“ Is there nothing more exalted in courage than to face bodily peril? Are all its instincts selfishness? What think you of the courage of him who, in all the conscious strength of intellect, with powers to win an upward way amongst the greatest and the highest, can stoop to a life of poverty and neglect, can give up all that men strive for,—home, affection, family, citizenship,——content to toil apart and alone, ——to watch, to fast, and pray, and think,——ay, think till the very brain reels with labor,—and all this for a cause in which he is but a unit! ”

“ To toil long hours for another’s advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the spectres of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little tighter. ”

“ There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the ease with the despotism of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living. ”

“ Call upon men to make useless things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair length of life impossible—call upon labour to do those things, and you are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are making it, in self-defence, callous and hard. ”

“ If I do a good deed in secret, I know that it is seen, and my conduct in this life is a pledge of the life to come. When I suffer injustice, I say to myself, the Almighty who does all things well will reward me: my bodily needs, my poverty, make the idea of death less intolerable. ”

“ Now, my friends, learn a lesson from this, a lesson for the battle of life, which every one of us has to fight from our cradle to our grave—the battle against misery, poverty, misfortune, sickness; the battle against worse enemies even than they—the battle against our own weak hearts, and the sins which so easily beset us against laziness, dishonesty, profligacy, bad tempers, hard-heartedness, deserved disgrace, the contempt of our neighbours, and just punishment from Almighty God. ”

“ We are able to sink, and to suffer—some of us bravely; we are able, when necessary, to 'die like the wolf in silence;' but of manly struggle we are incapable. Now, we have a plan of our own to propose, in which, we think, resides the grand arcanum of social regeneration. ”

“ We speak in terms of "having lived too long," "being tired of living," "life not worth living," etc., as if life were a prison sentence, and, often, rather than continue the servitude, we surmount and overcome the deterrent of pain and destroy the life. ”

“ And there are other struggles with adverse circumstances—struggles, it may be, with habits or appetites or passions—all of which require as much courage and more perseverance than the brief encounter of battle. Enough to contend with, enough to overcome, lies in the pathway of every individual. It may be one kind of difficulties, or it may be another, but plenty of difficulties of some kind or other every one may be sure of finding through life. There is but one way of looking at fate, whatever that may be, whether blessings or afflictions,—to behave with dignity under both. ”

“ Never again would the world seem fair and beautiful. Instead, all the weary fight and desperate battle with poverty and privation over again; the dull misery and the drab gray existence, and always the pain—the heavy, dragging pain of a broken life. ”

“ I admit the wearing power of fretting anxiety, of sorrow that saps the springs of life, of labour pushed to contempt of the physical and moral conditions of existence; but honest work for an honest purpose, the full exercise of all the powers from day to day, the steady strain of faculties that were meant for strain and which rust in disuse, never hurt any one yet. But the temptations of exuberant vitality are all, if not to over-strain, yet to a certain hardness, and arrogance, and disregard of eternal law. ”

“ It is thus, apparently, that a return to this earliest stage of our existence has come to stand as the supreme goal and object of all desire to escape from the turmoil, labour and conflict which developed life inevitably brings in its train. ”

“ This destiny may then become an intolerable compulsion; mere courage, an over-exertion of human power; mere justice, severity and unmercifulness; the sharp distinction between men, an actual separation, which tends on the one side to proud haughtiness and on the other to doubt and depression. A keen perception of such limitations and dangers must necessarily force life into new paths. ”

“ How many have to feel their way to the goal, through the blindness of ignorance and lack of experience? How many go bungling along from the lack of early discipline and drill in the vocation they have chosen? How many have to hobble along on crutches because they were never taught to help themselves, but to lean upon a father's wealth or a mother's indulgence? How many are weakened for the journey of life by self-indulgence, by dissipation, by "life-sappers;" how many are crippled by disease, by a weak constitution, by impaired eyesight or hearing? ”

“ You fear life, I fancy, on the principle of the hand of little employment. But perhaps my hypothesis is as unlike the truth as the one you chose. Well, if it be so, if you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them under—you must be very differently made from me, and I earnestly believe from the majority of men. ”

“ But to live,—to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,—this long and wasting heart martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,—this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman. ”