#difficulty

With European powers no new subjects of difficulty have arisen, and those which were under discussion, although not terminated, do not present a more unfavorable aspect for the future preservation of that good understanding which it has ever been our desire to cultivate. ↗

— Martin Van Buren

#arisen #aspect #been #cultivate #desire

If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this. ↗

— Friedrich August von Hayek

#because #capacity #consciously #convinced #difficulty

Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. ↗

— Elvis Costello

#i #i write #notes #singing #sometimes

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

— John Maynard Keynes

#difficulty #escaping #ideas #lies #much

The difficulty for me is that I'm interested in so many different things. I could never really imagine myself doing one thing, and I'm pretty sure that I'll end up doing four or five different things. ↗

— Emma Watson

#different #different things #difficulty #doing #end

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

I remember the difficulty we had in the beginning replacing magnetic cores in memories and eventually we had both cost and performance advantages. But it wasn't at all clear in the beginning. ↗

— Gordon Moore

#beginning #both #clear #cost #difficulty

Spain is facing an economic situation of extreme difficulty, I repeat, of extreme difficulty, and anyone who doesn't understand that is fooling themselves. ↗

— Mariano Rajoy

#difficulty #economic #economic situation #extreme #facing

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year. ↗

— Ishmael Reed

#black #could #difficulty #economic #fact