Difficulty

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. ~~ Terence

Going through the necessary soul searching of deciding whether to fight a battle, or to run away from it, is far more difficult than the battle itself. ~~ Richard Milhous Nixon

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. ~~ Theodore H. White

It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame. ~~ R. S. Trapp

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people. ~~ Marcel Proust

A man's intelligence does not increase as he acquires power. What does increase is the difficulty in telling him so. ~~ D. Southerland

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Warning signals of terminal seriousness: Persistent soreness about almost everything, frequent sudden changes of molehills into mountains, difficulty swallowing humor, emotional constipation. ~~ Paul E. McGhee, PhD

The psychological explanation for this is that we crabby perfectionists were started in that direction in our own childhood by the frequent criticism of our parents; it is very difficult to overcome the compulsion to repeat what was done to us. ~~ Benjamin Spock

To become oneself, with all one's strength. Difficult. A bomb, a speech, a rifle shot--and the world can look a different place. And then were is this "self?" ~~ Christa Wolf

Apart from the occasional saint, it is difficult for people who have the smallest amount of power to be nice. ~~ Dr. Anthony Clare

Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation, to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude, the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~~ Carl G. Jung

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance. ~~ Samuel Johnson

We prove what we want to prove, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove. ~~ Emile August Chartier

Bromidic though it may sound, some questions DON'T have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn. ~~ Katharine Graham

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them. ~~ Phyllis Bottome

A healthy touch of paranoia makes it that much more difficult for your enemies to get to you. ~~ Patricia Wallace

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusions that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. ~~ Arthur Koestler

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. ~~ Alice Miller

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. ~~ Hippocrates

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret. ~~ Mary McCarthy

If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult. ~~ Heraclitus

Nothing is less reliable than [a machine]… It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times. ~~ Pearl S. Buck [My Several Worlds]

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. ~~ Susan Sontag

A great law of human action--in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. ~~ Mark Twain

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. ~~ Iris Murdoch

We must never despair; our situation has been compromising before, and it has changed for the better; so I trust it will again. If difficulties arise, we must put forth new exertion and proportion our efforts to the exigencies of the times. ~~ George Washington

Ridding oneself of this feeling that the universe has a personal grudge against one is the first and most difficult task in growing to adulthood. ~~ Colin Wilson

U

Undertake something that is difficult; it will do you good. Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. ~~ Ronald E. Osborn

People tend to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn't seem to be leading anywhere. ~~ Charles M. Mathias, Jr.

We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see. ~~ Charles Peguy

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

[Advice to cats:] When you see your person settle down to do some fireside or after-dinner reading, jump up into his or her lap, get comfortable, and then put your paws across the book or paper. This will make turning the pages difficult, and after a while you will find they will give up. ~~ Paul Gallico

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago. ~~ Jim Bishop

I have often noticed that the suffering which is most difficult, if not impossible, to forgive is unreal, imagined suffering… The worst, most obstinate grievances are imagined ones. ~~ Laurens van der Post

The self-confidence one builds from achieving difficult things and accomplishing goals is the most beautiful thing of all. ~~ Madonna

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change. ~~ Margery Allingham

To define what a woman is today is as difficult as sniffing air and breaking down each scent. ~~ Kathy Kinney

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess. ~~ Rene Descartes

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem. ~~ Henry A. Kissinger

If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth but, if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. We shall find it less difficult to hide a thousand guineas than one hole in our coat. ~~ Charles Caleb Colton [Lacon]

The efficiency of our criminal jury system is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read. ~~ Mark Twain

I find it very difficult to draw a line between what's sex and what isn't. It can be very, very sexy to drive a car, and completely unsexy to flirt with someone at a bar. ~~ Bjork

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. ~~ Seneca

A simple and a proper function of government is just to make it easy for us to do good and difficult for us to do wrong. ~~ Jimmy Carter

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say. ~~ Samuel Johnson

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult. ~~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. ~~ Henri Frederic Amiel

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~~ John Steinbeck

Moral: Don't try and solve all your difficulties at the same time. Most will solve themselves or disappear. ~~ John Bingham

Isn't life difficult enough without exercise? ~~ Ashleigh Brilliant

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. ~~ Peter Drucker

To become a father is easy, but to be a father is difficult. ~~ Unattributed

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle. ~~ Andre Gide

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. ~~ Upton Sinclair

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. ~~ E. B. White [The Second Tree from the Corner]

Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious. ~~ Thomas Aquinas

It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. ~~ H. W. Shaw

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. ~~ Bertrand Russell

There are times when forgetting can be just as important as remembering--and even more difficult. ~~ Harry and Joan Mier

To put your ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the world. ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Instead of striving to make even the tiniest mark on the world, perhaps … the sole purpose for which I was born is to amuse Orson … to make his strange and difficult life as easy, as full of delight, as rewarding as it can be. ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

In this age, which believes that there is a shortcut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest. ~~ Henry Miller

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. ~~ William Somerset Maugham

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others. ~~ Marcel Proust

It's as interesting and difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colors, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important. ~~ Vincent van Gogh

The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. ~~ G. K. Chesterton [Come to Think of It]

As a substitute father for hundreds of youths over the past thirteen years, I have yet to encounter a young person in difficulty whose trouble could not be traced to the lack of a strong father image in his home. ~~ Paul Anderson

I've been having kind of a difficult day… my Inner Child threw up on my Higher Power. ~~ Lynn Lavner

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. ~~ Edward Degas

Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed. ~~ Baltasar Gracian

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity. ~~ William Hazlitt

Nobody who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be. ~~ Jane Austin

Love is the invention of a few high cultures… it is cultural artifact. To make love the requirement of a lifelong marriage is exceedingly difficult, and only a few people can achieve it. I don't believe in setting universal standards that a large proportion of people can't reach. ~~ Margaret Mead

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever. ~~ Isak Dinesen

The easiest books are generally the best, for whatever author is obscure and difficult in his own language certainly does not think clearly. ~~ Lord Chesterfield

Only grown-ups have difficulty with childproof bottles. ~~ Joe Moore

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. ~~ Baron de Montesquieu

Intimacy can grow only in a place of safety. When husband and wife are afraid of hurt, rebuff, criticism, and misunderstanding, they will find it difficult to touch and share freely… If you want real intimacy in your marriage, you will have to establish trust in your relationship. ~~ Ed Wheat

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. ~~ Charlotte Bronte [Jane Eyre]

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. ~~ Virginia Woolf

The most difficult secret for a man to keep is his own opinion of himself. ~~ Marcel Pagnol

[Growing up] is especially difficult to achieve for a child whose parents do not take him seriously; that is, who do not expect proper behavior from him, do not discipline him, and finally, do not respect him enough to tell him the truth. ~~ Thomas S. Szasz

Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex, and demanding of human relationships. ~~ Margaret Mead [Male and Female]

Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions. ~~ Margery Allingham [The Tiger in the Smoke]

It is very difficult to slow down. The practice of medicine is like the heart muscle's contraction--it's all or none. ~~ Bela Schick

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us? ~~ W. H. Auden

Art is long, life is short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient. ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards. ~~ William Arthur Ward

Difficult things take a long time;

The impossible takes a little longer. ~~ Unattributed

Marathon swimming is the most difficult physical, intellectual and emotional battleground I have encountered. And each time I win, each time I touch the other shore, I feel worthy of any other challenge life has to offer. ~~ Diana Nyad

There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists. ~~ Dorothy L. Sayers [The Mind of the Maker]

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

Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown. ~~ Thomas F. Woodlock

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. ~~ Lionel Trilling

What is my proudest accomplishment? I went through some pretty difficult times, and I kept my sanity. ~~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

If a parent pictures for a child that his or her value in life is low, that child will find it difficult to rise above these words. In one insightful study of fathers and their daughters, it was found that these women's achievements in life were directly related to the level of their father's acceptance of them. ~~ William S. Appleton

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. ~~ Rod Serling

I find I am always glad when the birthday is over. Then you have another whole year. The most difficult ones are the ones that end with a zero--20, 30, 40, 50, 60 whatever. Those are the hard ones. The others are rest periods between the zeros. ~~ Robert Dole

Our lives improve only when we take chances--and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves. ~~ Walter Anderson

It is difficult to love mankind unless one has a reasonable private income, and when one has a reasonable private income one has better things to do than loving mankind. ~~ Hugh Kingsmill

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know they real truth about his or her love affairs. ~~ Rebecca West

To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult. ~~ Plutarch

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. ~~ Edward R. Murrow

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong, without comment. ~~ Theodore H. White

Well, living is difficult, period. Being happy and serene and all that stuff doesn't get necessarily any easier just 'cause you're more mature--or sober. ~~ Bonnie Raitt

Know how to ask. There is nothing more difficult for some people, nor for others, easier. ~~ Baltasar Gracian

'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard, Master Harry--every man of every nation has done that --'tis the living up to it that's difficult. ~~ William Makepeace Thackeray

If you think too much about being reelected, it is very difficult to be worth reelecting. ~~ Woodrow Wilson (see Said Who?)