Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.
The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.
Bearing ourselves humbly before God. . . we await undismayed the impending assault. . . be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parlay; we may show mercy - we shall ask for none.
The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.
Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart.
The divorce was rough on all of us. I don't blame Hollywood for my family's problems. But having all of it reported in the press made it more of an ordeal.
We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.
Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups.
Old age is an ordeal, of flesh and mind. Of winding down, of slowing down, of dying cells. It's accepting the loss of physical attractiveness and replacing it with the power and wisdom that can only come with old age.
It took me ten years to write The Night Journal, so that was a big ordeal.
There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude.
Human character is never found "to enter into its glory," except through the ordeal of affliction. Its force cannot come forth without the offer of resistance, nor can the grandeur of its free will declare itself, except in the battle of fierce temptation.
Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
Racing should never be an ordeal, rather an enjoyable and life-enhancing experience.
These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.
Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.
Going out is such a hassle. The singles club scene where you sit down, talk, get to know each other, hang out-it's such a big ordeal.