Difficulty Quotes

“It is difficult to love someone who loves you, but easy to hate someone who loves you, and love someone who hates you.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“God's and beasts, that is what our world is made of.”
― Adolf Hitler

“There are certain truths that occurs to us, which we cannot convey in words, but requires a personal experience to grasp more vividly.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“You know, sometimes it's nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.”
― Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die

“Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.”
― Eugene Paul Wigner

“so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than
anything else.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory.

The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round.

But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production.

Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts).

However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.

Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.)

The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment.

Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.”
― Karl Popper

“Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.”
― Evariste Galois

“No one 'just adopts'.”
― Jody Cantrell Dyer, The Eye of Adoption: The True Story of My Turbulent Wait for a Baby

“In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study

“Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primeval hill-side.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Criticism on "The Origin of Species"

“Do it again and again. Consistency makes the rain drops to create holes in the rock. Whatever is difficult can be done easily with regular attendance, attention and action.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.”
― Gian-Carlo Rota

“The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.”
― Carl David Anderson

“Leave complains behind; Stop worrying and murmuring about the difficulty of something that you have not even attempted doing! How do you know that it's difficult if you have not even attempted doing it? Go, give a try!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“You may have been too quick to admit the difficulty of a specific task. The question is "how many times have you tried dealing with it"? Don't say it's difficult if you haven't tried it!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“Behind each and every difficult mountain is an easy valley. Keep climbing; endure a little more. Your pain will bring you gain!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Do extremely difficult work.

That seems obvious, right? If you do something that's valued but scarce because it's difficult, you're more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.

The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it's easy, it's not for you.”
― Seth Godin

“Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Shirts are so complicated.”
― Aisha Cat

“We're so accustomed to laughing. It's harder for us when the time comes that we can't laugh.”
― Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die

“To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency ... . The Realist position is probably the one which most mathematicians would prefer to take. It is not until he becomes aware of some of the difficulties in set theory that he would even begin to question it. If these difficulties particularly upset him, he will rush to the shelter of Formalism, while his normal position will be somewhere between the two, trying to enjoy the best of two worlds.”
― Paul Cohen

“The arbiter of a demanding wargame rendered the word "mismatch" as "challenge" in his language.”
― Star Trek The Next Generation

“The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.”
― Felix Klein, Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint: Geometry

“As someone who struggles with anxiety and cowardice, as we all do, I’m profoundly inspired by. . . . full-on commitment to wonder, to wonder as a response to anguish or difficulty. It makes everything a puzzle, right? A catastrophe is nothing but a puzzle with the volume of drama turned up very high.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Do you feel like your action plans are stronger to than your capability? Just take a moment a draw a plan of how to deal with the difficult task with a single bite at each time. Go slow, but sure!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Nothing is easy,” and, with respect to legal work, that was absolutely true.”
― Kenneth Eade, Predatory Kill

“Taking the one seat describes two related aspects of spiritual work. Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and teacher among all the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding.”
― Jack Kornfield

“Nothing is too gnarly.”
― Danny Way