Difficult Tasks Quotes

One of the most difficult tasks of visioneering is distinguishing between good ideas and God ideas. ~ Andy Stanley

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence.
They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...)
Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood. ~ Colette Dowling

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom. ~ Phillis Wheatley

I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task. ~ Mark Twain

graphical user interfaces make
easy tasks easy, while command line interfaces make difficult tasks possible ~ William E. Shotts Jr.

I know, to banish anger altogether from one's breast is a difficult task. It cannot be achieved through pure personal effort. It can be done only by God's grace. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Remember that the most difficult tasks are consummated, not by a single explosive burst of energy or effort, but by the constant daily application of the best you have within you. ~ Og Mandino

Approach difficult tasks with a positive attitude - you'll inspire others and feel better about what's ahead ~ Denise Austin

Learning to trust is one of life's most difficult tasks. ~ Isaac Watts

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change. ~ Carroll Quigley

Archimedes once said that 'Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.' There is a much more difficult task than this: To try to lift an ignorant up from where he stands, because he is heavily chained to the stupidity! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He said how love was the sweetest expression of life. The one thing that made life worth living. Love made difficult tasks easy. Raising a family could be a great burden, but if there was love, the sacrifice was a pleasure. And when love matured into devotion then everything you did for your lover was a joy. You would give up your life to save those you loved. On the other hand, if love did not mature it could lead to bondage, to jealousy. If you loved someone, but felt possessive of them, you could end up treating them like an object that belonged to you. Just as bad, with your children, if you showered them with too much love, and never disciplined them, they would grow up weak and spoiled. At times, love had to be tough, or it could end up wrecking those dearest to you. ~ Christopher Pike

It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears. ~ Plutarch

When it comes to childhood, therefore, it was reasonable to suggest that a prolonged period before independence was required once humans began to perform difficult tasks, like hunting or making pottery and baskets. Children could spend their time practicing these skills, which would better prepare them for success as adults in a hunter-gatherer society. In effect, this idea would mean that children are schooling themselves, and were doing so long before formal education was invented. ~ Marlene Zuk

It is a very strange thing to see so many images in the world around us ... we don't realise it, but we are all impressionable beings, able to pick up off of the images that bombard us on a daily basis. We are created and moulded by images and impressions. One of the most difficult tasks in life, is to keep a steady impression of something in your sight, and to believe in it until it becomes you. Because there is just so much temptation/opportunity, to become something else. ~ C. JoyBell C.

It is Easy to be a Hater. Go for the difficult Task: be a Lover! ~ Paulo Coelho

Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task. ~ Sigmund Freud

I believe that positive energy and optimism help us to take up any challenge in life and to succeed in even the most difficult tasks. I also believe that positive energy is contagious: we can transmit it to others. ~ Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

The difficult tasks to be performed are not the ones that mean physical and mental labor, but the ones that you dislike, are the ones that you do not love. There are unpleasant angles to nearly every important job to be done in this world, but there must be an over all love for doing each, else precious time and effort are uselessly wasted. I shall never forget noting a sign above a construction job that read: "Builder of Difficult Foundations." That man must have loved that calling, else he would not have made a point of advertising the fact! ~ George Matthew Adams

People infer high self-efficacy from successes achieved through minimal effort on difficult tasks, but they infer low self-efficacy if they had to work hard under favorable conditions to master relatively easy tasks ~ Albert Bandura

Deal with difficult tasks while they are easy. Act on large issues while they are small. ~ Laozi

The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them ... ~ Terry Pratchett

Though we all make mistakes, don't handicap yourself in difficult tasks; Self-sabotage is not a strategy. Sometimes all you need to do is protect yourself from your own self. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present. ~ Nelson Rockefeller

Sometimes, I feel promoting a film is a more difficult task than acting! ~ Emraan Hashmi

The Job Application

Esteemed gentlemen,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and fo ~ Robert Walser

The virtue of obedience makes the will supple ... It inspires the courage with which to fulfill the most difficult tasks. ~ John Vianney

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting. ~ Arne Jacobsen

A little bit of something beats a lot of nothing. Break the largest of difficult tasks into the smallest of steps and it can be done. ~ Dan Millman

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God's grace and God's grace alone for our celebration. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people - for beggars. We don't want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there. ~ R.C. Sproul

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized. ~ Peter Singer

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. ~ Karl Marx

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer. ~ James Dyson

When we intentionally seek out the difficult tasks, we're much more likely to actually create value. ~ Seth Godin

Our most difficult task as a friend is to offer understanding when we don't understand. ~ Robert Breault

A guest is really good or bad because of the host or hostess who makes being a guest an easy or a difficult task. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers. ~ Simon Winchester

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.
By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.
Just as I'd hoped. ~ Michael J. Fox

There are women vain of advantages not connected with their persons, such as birth, rank, and fortune; it is difficult to feel less the dignity of the sex. The origin of all women may be called celestial, for their power is the offspring of the gifts of Nature; by yielding to pride and ambition they soon destroy the magic of their charms. ~ Madame De Stael

Hats are attached to special moments in people's lives - weddings, or the races. In difficult times, people still get married; they still want to look their best. ~ Philip Treacy

I was really impressed with Naomi [Watts]. She was a producer, and she was doing things that I wasn't really aware of. The way she was able to switch from handling problems to shoot a really difficult scene, I think is a real testament to her true ability. ~ Michael Pitt

Sometimes emotions to be express... is difficult... nothing is perfect... Emotions by themself, aren't perfect. ~ Deyth Banger

TV is terrific. It's really fast paced which I find difficult. ~ Ann Dowd

God sees you and me in our pain and our brokenness. He sees you walking a difficult path when the sun goes down and your life is a far cry from that which you expected or dreamed up. He sees you, dear friend, when the ending of the story is not the one that you yearned for and your prayers seem unanswered and it all just feels like a bit of a mess. He wants to name these places The Lord Will Provide. In the places where you thought life might be easier, when you thought things might be different, when you thought you might be better, be more, God provides His Son who meets you and provides grace for your gaps and light in your darkness. ~ Katie Davis Majors

Some fatherlands are difficult. Germany is one of them. But it is our fatherland. Here is where we live and work. ~ Gustav Heinemann

For Kitty Gilbert in 'Topsy-Turvy,' I had to get to the point where I could improvise in the style of 1880, which is difficult. The research for that was huge. ~ Lesley Manville

It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language. ~ A.E. Van Vogt

If we try to prohibit encryption or discourage it or make it more difficult to use, we're going to suffer the consequences that will be far reaching and very difficult to reverse, and we seem to have realized that in the wake of the September 11th attacks. To the extent there is any reason to be hopeful, perhaps that's where we'll end up here. ~ Matt Blaze

Even when we truly understand these matters, the journey of spiritual growth is still so lonely and difficult that we often become discouraged. ~ M. Scott Peck

Coming out of the forest was much harder than coming in. Marian had always found coming out difficult- generally, she arrived at a graveyard unencumbered and left with pockets or satchels full of coin and jewels, which made concealment much more difficult. It was of course also tremendously easy to walk into a shop with the intent of stealing, but immensely more of a problem to come out of one with a loaf of bread tucked under her arm. Perhaps most difficult of all had been coming out to her family the day she told them she was their daughter and their sister, as opposed to the son and brother they had previously been lead to believe she was. That had been an odd sort of day. At the time, her ~ Dajo Jago

I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn't touch the ground. "Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I'll eat him!" Giving that up was very difficult later on in life. ~ Mel Brooks

It was very difficult to recognize the monster for it was cunning and disguised itself well. Unless you looked at it closely, you might almost have taken it for a human being. Almost. ~ Mechthild Gläser

Measuring progress is often like watching grass grow. While it's difficult to detect movement on a daily basis, it's simple to see growth over time. ~ Frank Sonnenberg

I believe the best mode of aiding convicts is so to apportion their tasks in prison as to give to the industrious the opportunity of earning a sum for themselves by 'over-work.' A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire. ~ Dorothea Dix

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life. ~ Anton Chekhov

Mountaineering is one of the most difficult sports - we are away from routine life for days, living in tents, and it requires high degree of physical and mental strength. ~ Samina Baig

She had little patience with people who got intellectually lazy when faced with a difficult concept. ~ Beth Fantaskey

The most difficult lesson is not being bitter - that balancing you need to do so you don't become bitter, even as you cease being gullible. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Vision is a difficult, precarious, and fugitive extrapolation from a very few and ambiguous moments in our earthly experience, while our idea of the negated natural goods is vivid and persistent, loaded with the memories of a lifetime, built into our nerves and muscles and therefore into our imaginations. ~ C.S. Lewis

I am about to proceed on a long and difficult voyage, the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude: I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing. ~ Mary Shelley

I firmly believe that in every situation, no matter how difficult, God extends grace greater than the hardship, and strength and peace of mind that can lead us to a place higher than where we were before. ~ Andy Griffith

When understanding would be too difficult, I become trusting. ~ Mason Cooley

Juggling work and parental responsibilities is no easy task, but I'm trying my best and just like everything else there are good days and there are bad days. ~ Ali Landry

Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen. ~ Claude Chabrol

Yet Nancy Wexler's obsession with finding the gene was driven by her desire to mend it or cure it when she did find it. And she is undoubtedly closer to that goal now than ten years ago. 'I am an optimist', she writes, 'Even though I feel this hiatus in which we will be able only to predict and not to prevent will be exceedingly difficult .. . I believe the knowledge will be worth the risks.'
What of Nancy Wexler herself? Several times in the late 1980s, she and her elder sister Alice sat down with their father Milton to discuss whether either of the women should take the test. The debates were tense, angry and inconclusive. Milton was against taking the test, stressing its uncertainties and the danger of a false diagnosis. Nancy had been determined that she wanted the test, but her determination gradually evaporated in the face of a real possibility. Alice chronicled the discussions in a diary that later became a soulsearching book called Mapping fate. The result was that neither woman took the test. Nancy is now the same age as her mother was when she was diagnosed. ~ Matt Ridley

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. ~ Theodor Adorno

WHITLOCK 2 (to VRIL):
In my humble opinion,
Be off to oblivion!
Their tears crocodilian
Will dry here below.

Your act is vaudevillian,
Your faults are octillion!
Your manners reptilian
Would shock a Brazilian!
Alas, but a Vrillian's a pitiful beau!
A despicable, fickle, unprintable foe!

LADY CADENCE: (still in the grip of VRIL) Mr. Cartwright, my most mannered acquaintances hail from Brazil.

WHITLOCK 2: My apologies, Your Ladyship. It's a difficult rhyme. ~ Bill Powell

After his wife died, in great pain C. S. Lewis realized, "If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came."3 Our own suffering is often our wake-up call. But even if you aren't now facing it, look around and you'll see many who are.
...
Suffering and evil exert a force that either pushes us away from God or pulls us toward him.
...
Unfortunately, most evangelical churches - whether traditional, liturgical, or emergent - have failed to teach people to think biblically about the realities of evil and suffering. A pastor's daughter told me, "I was never taught the Christian life was going to be difficult. I've discovered it is, and I wasn't ready."
...
On the other side of death, the Bible promises that all who know him will fall into the open arms of a holy, loving, and gracious God - the greatest miracle, the answer to the problem of evil and suffering. He promises us an eternal kingdom on the New Earth, where he says of those who come to trust him in this present world of evil and suffering, "They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:3–4) ~ Randy Alcorn

If there is beauty, there is ugliness. If there is good, there is bad. Being and nonbeing and difficult and easy and high and low and long and short and before and after and need, depend, create and define each other. ~ James Frey

Changing the world is like trying to straighten a dog's tail. However much you may try, you won't succeed. But although the tail won't straighten, if you keep trying every day, at least you will put on some muscle. Similarly, even though it is difficult to make a change, our effort to do so in itself brings positive results. It will help us change. Without waiting for others to change,if we change ourselves first, that will make a difference. Instead of worrying about results, focus on doing our best in what we are engaged in. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi

Damn this human who had come into her life and made himself so important to her; had made coming to terms with her inner monster that much more difficult to bear. ~ Samantha Young

In a state of grace with myself, I do not abandon myself when the going gets tough or should others find me antithetical in any way in their frames of reference. Loyalty means care and kindness at all times, and particularly when they are needed to reduce the pain of difficult times. I never, absolutely never, side with anyone who is against my welfare. I aid nobody who detracts from my dignity, who makes me feel less than human either through subhuman onslaughts or superhuman demands. I fight or avoid people whose effect is ultimately destructive to my validity as a person, or who in any way dilute my ability to take myself seriously. ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greenie clarify butter, wash rice, devein shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves. ~ Julia Glass

The student, balancing between the deep knowledge of the specialist and the broad curiosity of the generalist, must develop, largely on their own, their capacity to be conscious of past and emerging idioms, to see their own work in the context of developing styles, and – most difficult of all – to identify how their own personal style can co-exist with the restrictions of utility and the conventions of genre. ~ Gerry Leonidas

To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times. ~ Michael Caine

If you are facing a difficult task don't put it off. If you do it will just keep tormenting you. ~ Joyce Meyer

The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it. ~ Merle Hoffman

In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight.
And, like it or not, you're in it. ~ Steve Sheinkin

Difficult is a far cry from impossible. The distance between these two lies hope. Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Invite one to stay. ~ Maya Angelou