Emotions and Feelings

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious.

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, “Thus far and no farther.”

Success is sweet, the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.

I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

It’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

Believe me, every heart has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.