Hard Times quotes
642 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside hard times — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Nothing that you plan is going to work out. Everything is going to be totally different than the way you expected. And things will constantly challenge you. Wherever you look the world is not as solid it seems to be."
"If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day."
"We must never despair; our situation has been compromising before, and it has changed for the better; so I trust it will again. If difficulties arise, we must put forth new exertion and proportion our efforts to the exigencies of the times."
"We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."
"Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like."
"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."
"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality."
"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."
"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."
"The Supreme Court is having a hard time integrating schools. What chance do I have to integrate audiences?"
"All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society."
"America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws."
"I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times."
"The hard times make a true friend afraid to ask."
"Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity."
"Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses."
"Take the time to define yourself and define your value. If you're having a hard time doing that, ask yourself: What is something I would say to someone I love?"
"Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today."
"Hard times fall upon everybody. Whatever it is, we're going to get out of it."
"It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn."
