“[B]etter the beauty of struggle and futility than the illusion of accomplishment; for as we struggle, he would seem to say, so are we beautiful.”

“Life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful.”

“The point was the struggle. The earth thickened here so that he would labor. The shovel felt heavy so that he could feel he was doing something. The world provided resistance, and as we struggled through, we learned our final lessons.”

“Nothing is more beautiful than a smile that has struggled through tears”

“I feel that every human being is beautiful, and I think that each one of us needs to realize how beautiful we really are, I struggle with that everyday.”

“Without imagination, we merely see or hear, and even if we see or hear that the objects of the senses are beautiful, we cannot feel that they are so. The difference is this: in feeling the beauty of objects, we enjoy not only the common, shared pleasures of the senses, but also the private pleasures of the imagination, peculiar to ourselves, and such that we have to struggle to articulate them.”