#difficulty

The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#capital #capital gains #decisions #difficulty #directly

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. ↗

— John Maynard Keynes

#difficulty #escaping #ideas #lies #much

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: ‘For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.’ “Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius ‘not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.’ Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. ↗

— Jane Hirschfield

#difficulty #poetry #art

Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness - a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster - children into strength and athletic proportion. ↗

— William C. Bryant

#brethren #children #difficulty #foster #greatness

A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract. ↗

— Joseph Lancaster

#difficulty #disposition #education #find #gratify

The complaint of bad pay, and difficulty in obtaining it, is almost generally reiterated through every department of education. ↗

— Joseph Lancaster

#bad #complaint #department #difficulty #education

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms. ↗

— Karl Landsteiner

#chemical #constitution #dealing #determined #difficulty

A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms. ↗

— Gregory Bateson

#answer #answers #difficulty #forms #given

Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty. ↗

— William Bennett

#develop #difficulty #even #give #greater

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. ↗

— H. P. Blavatsky

#chief #difficulty #divine #materialism #men