Internal Struggle Quotes

You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I find I have to be the sad clown: laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.

Almost all stress, tension, anxiety, and frustration, both in life and in work, comes from doing one thing while you believe and value something completely different.

I've got at least two major project ideas that I've been chewing on for several years in my head and I've been trying to resist them both. But I have learned over the years that when they don't go away and they're still in there, you probably have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to do something about them.

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

New Year's resolutions have always been something to beat myself up with by the second week of January. It seems perverse to set yourself up for failure right at the start of the year.

No one but myself can be blamed for my fall. I have been my own greatest enemy-the cause of my own disastrous fate.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.

The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.

To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.

Maybe my great struggle, and it's probably not anything different from too many other people, but it certainly is what drives the music, is a hugely internal one.

I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined.

Contention does not usually begin as strife between countries. More often, it starts with an individual, for we can contend within ourselves over simple matters of right and wrong. From there, contention can infect neighbors and nations like a spreading sore.

Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.