7 & 7: Struggle vs. Give In

REFLECTION:

In many ways the human life is defined by struggle. We should not take life too lightly. Rather life should be considered dear and rare and glorious. We measure success by the obstacles overcome. What you would die for tells you what you have lived for. Something just beyond your grasp is worth a struggle. Adversity strengthens. False admirers do not. Trouble and handling it are one and the same. First you learn to struggle, then you learn to win. Your flower will bloom, but count on blisters before the job is done. Manage by understanding that efforts made now are a down payment for future restful nights. And giving in to evil forces now only gets you nightmares later on. Keep eyes wide open. The greatest challenges are well hidden, or in areas where you lack either aptitude or interest or both, or in areas where your great passion is shared by no one, at least at first. With all of these obstacles to overcome, how do strugglers succeed? They don’t give up. They don’t pretend. And life goes on.

MUSES:

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘tis dearness only that gives everything it’s value.
Thomas Paine

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington

If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Martin Luther King

Ah, but man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning

Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then.
Samuel Johnson

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say I embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The nature of the flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker

If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.
Abigail van Buren

When you can’t solve the problem, manage it.
Dr. Robert H. Schuller

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Frederic Chopin

The crisis you have to worry about most is the one you don’t see coming.
Mike Mansfield

No man can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
T. S. Eliot

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Vincent van Gogh

In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life. It goes on.
Robert Frost