The diagnosis of disease is often easy, often difficult, and often impossible.
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Book I, ch. 173Peter Mere Latham
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Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
Henry Brougham
People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.Rainer Maria Rilke
The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.
Anatol Rapoport
He used also to say that that man was unfortunate who could not support misfortune; and that it is a disease of the mind to desire what was impossible, and to have no regard for the misfortunes of others. Being asked what was difficult, he said — "To bear a change of fortune for the worse with magnanimity."
Bias of Priene
Atheists.—What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult, to be born or to rise again; that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us; want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking! Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock? 222
Blaise Pascal
Latham, Peter Mere
Lathrop, George Parsons
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