Struggle of life

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Forgotten little units in our disdainful world, we pass them scornfully by. Other lives, and perhaps better, do you think? For them the struggle never came which holds us in a fist of brass, and thrashes us up and down the pavement of life. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil—toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. ”

“ Struggle there must be and always will be. The struggle began as purely physical; as man evolved it shifted ground to the mental, psychic, and the spiritual, with a few dashes of cave-man proclivities still left. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What floods of tears and blood, what long wails of woe, sound down the centuries of the past, poured forth by humanity in its desperate struggle for a better life—a struggle which was blind, unconscious of its aims, unknowing of the means by which they should be obtained, groping in darkness for the track leading it knew not whither!
Ignorant of his past, ignorant of his real needs, ignorant of himself, man has blundered and stumbled up the thorny path of progress for tens of thousands of years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am aware that long struggle with distress and difficulty will not only cloud the mind, but degrade the manners of the sufferer, but still I cannot but think that my habits and conduct could not justify my exclusion from the line of society to which I was born, and in which till latterly I have always lived. ”

“ 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. ”

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

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vitality of the stories, too, is remarkable. Life, very real life, is pictured; life full of joys and sorrows, happinesses and heartbreaks, courage and self-sacrifice; of self-abnegation, of struggle, of victory. ”

“ 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! ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ We, the so-called living, are in fact merely beset by a series of stormy visions which constitute life; all our efforts are expended upon mere phantoms, and are therefore profitless; our mental conflict is an act of trance, exercised upon mere nothings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And if we are in another place to last like those unfailing lights—to become happy or wretched, and, in either state, indestructible for ever—what signify the labour and troubles of life, compared with that by which our everlasting fate is fixed? ”

“ Are there not boys and girls, school loves and friendship, courtings and match-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human passions, —the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition,—sin and remorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations? Who shall say that we have not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simple nature, of the hearth and the farm-field? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference, the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of Nature—in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human life—leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied surface of the faces of mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life seemed a great, inexorable machine, setting at naught human aspiration, human endeavor. What was the good of fighting it? What was the sense in believing in a divine order, in such infernal chaos? ”

“ For, indeed, the meaning of our struggle is to regain that time, through toil and the fullness of learning, and to live again in the oneness of mind and feeling which is to open to us the doors of the kingdom. ”

“ 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. ”