Grapple Quotes

#1. Attempting to grapple with improving end-of-life care is a political third rail.

Katy Butler

#2. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don't grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.

Deborah Blum

#3. Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.

Cynthia Daignault

#4. The Friends Thou Hast
And Their Adoption Tried
Grapple Them To Thy Soul
With Hooks Of Steel

William Shakespeare

#5. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.

William Shakespeare

#6. Before we can even begin to grapple with the frustrations and tragedies of life in this world, we must do away with our faithless morality of payback and reward.

Tullian Tchividjian

#7. The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

Carl Sagan

#8. Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

Oscar Wilde

#9. You can't have the legislative and executive branch working in a parallel universe ... the partisanship that has gripped Washington has prevented us from dealing with the issues that this country needs to grapple with to determine its future.

Olympia Snowe

#10. I think that our cooperative conservation approaches get people to sit down and grapple with problem solving.

Gale Norton

#11. Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.

Joan D. Chittister

#12. As we wisely gain knowledge through the everyday stuff, and grapple with the development of our discernment through everyday stuff, we'll use what we have to our advantage in making better decisions. (41)

Lysa TerKeurst

#13. Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.

Eva Brann

#14. I can analyse the trajectory of my popularity and find out why the peak was a peak and the valley was a valley - grapple with it that way - but I prefer not to analyse it that much.

Corey Hart

#15. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

Scott Stossel

#16. With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.

Anne Sexton

#17. No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.

Peter Medawar

#18. Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

John Milton

#19. In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

Li Bai

#20. For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers.

Neel Burton

#21. Providence has hidden a charm in difficult undertakings, which is appreciated only by those who dare to grapple with them.

Sophie Swetchine

#22. Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#23. Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.

Patrick Hayden

#24. God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he's going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.

Donald Miller

#25. We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Richard Feynman

#26. I think it's a really good idea to be bumping into all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. So you make art with strangers. You give a reading. You move somewhere new and try to build a life. You grapple with humanity.

Laurel Nakadate

#27. Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron.

William Timothy Murray

#28. There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks.

Ben H. Winters

#29. Although my work is to grapple with words, I have no words with which to describe and explain this feeling. Perhaps I write stories to show that in life there are moments, emotions, and events that cannot be explained with words.

Shahriar Mandanipour

#30. And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#31. The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new ... is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.

Eric Hoffer

#32. That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to ... grapple with the unfamiliar.

Brian Aldiss

#33. Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

Alice Sebold

#34. People are not wrong in observing Caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated this notion of Caste. If this is correct, then obviously the enemy, you must grapple with is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras which teach them this religion of Caste.

B.R. Ambedkar

#35. I am an apple, yet i taste like a grape... Im a grapple.

Kelly Young

#36. Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.

Mal Peet

#37. I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.

Phil Klay

#38. We are sure to get the better of fortune if we do but grapple with her.

Seneca The Younger

#39. Dealing with our negative emotions is a crucial preparatory step to taking effective action. You have to grapple with the hard stuff, with the hard realities of the world. This builds your confidence that you can handle those intense situations when they arise.

Tim DeChristopher

#40. Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.

Arthur Miller

#41. So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way. And some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home.

Jandy Nelson

#42. I think you're going to see a number of Democrats that do want to see us grapple with spending.

Amy Klobuchar

#43. It's very difficult to grapple with the idea of not being able to wrestle any more, but you also have to come to the realization that this is a very physical business, and your body will only last you so long.

Daniel Bryan

#44. Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

Terry Teachout

#45. The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

Michael Lewis

#46. Cop shows are by definition melodramatic; they're larger than life. They create very stark contrasts and conflicts emotionally. They're provocative, assuming they grapple with - to the extent that cop shows are mirrors of the culture.

Steven Bochco

#47. There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.

Daniel Tammet

#48. You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies.
I've seen millions of them.
I've seen more eclipses than I care to remember

Markus Zusak

#49. Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

David Bergen

#50. As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud") Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret?

Michael Lewis

#51. he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers.

Brian D. McLaren

#52. To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

Irving Stone

#53. If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.

Henry Adams

#54. We're put here on Earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them. On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#55. Whatever measure of influence I had as a result of the importance which the world attaches to the Nobel Peace Prize would have to be used to bring the philosophy of nonviolence to all the world's people who grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#56. My intention was to grapple with the metaphysical meaning behind Scheherazade and present that meaning in its essence. Scheherazade is the symbol of the savior. She weaves tales not to save her own life, but to save humanity from its unending retributive response to injury.

Alonzo King

#57. Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

John Green

#58. I believe most definitely that one must not only grapple with the problems on the board, one must also make every effort to combat the thoughts and will of the opponent.

Mikhail Tal

#59. Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.

Steven Soderbergh

#60. No errors of opinion can possibly be dangerous in a country where opinion is left free to grapple with them.

William Gilmore Simms

#61. The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women's Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.

Shannon Drury

#62. ... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.

Jeremy Paxman

#63. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Herman Melville

#64. The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple

John Brown

#65. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

Jane Hirshfield

#66. It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

Paul Di Filippo

#67. Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.

Robert Kennedy

#68. Art ... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

Agnes Repplier

#69. Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

Douglas Adams

#70. As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

Richard Holbrooke

#71. I love being entertained sure, but the movies that I live for, the movies that I buy and think about and stay in my mind are the movies that entertain me but leave me with something a little uncomfortable to grapple with in the lobby.

Justin Simien

#72. An inarticulate scream of rage strangled me. I wanted
to destroy something, to spend my anger against the unfairness of every thing. I wanted nothing more than to grapple with the Goblin King, to tear him from limb to limb, a Maenad against Orpheus. I tightened my hands into fists.

S. Jae-Jones

#73. There exist some evils so terrible and some misfortunes so horrible that we dare not think of them, whilst their very aspect makes us shudder; but if they happen to fall on us, we find ourselves stronger than we imagined, we grapple with our ill luck, and behave better than we expected we should.

Jean De La Bruyere

#74. I hate the idea that, when it comes to books and learning, hard is often seen as the opposite of fun. It's strange to me that we should be so quick to give up on a book or a math problem when we are so willing to grapple, for centuries if necessary, with a single level of Angry Birds.

John Green

#75. The twisty nature of psychic attack - are you being attacked, or did you bring this attack on yourself? - speaks to me of an American cultural paradox we all grapple with. There's the rampant litigiousness of our society, and the desire to blame others for our misfortunes.

Heidi Julavits

#76. This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.

Susan Freinkel

#77. Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God. ... Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.

Seraphim Rose

#78. You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.

David Attenborough

#79. Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.

Alanis Morissette

#80. My favorite kinds of stories are the ones that have these big crazy genre hijinks and then a real honest, meaty, emotional story where we're watching a character grapple with some real things.

Greg Pak

#81. In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.

Natasha Trethewey

#82. We can only grasp the gospel's sweetness if we first grapple with its offense- you can't save yourself.

Timothy Keller

#83. Michelle has had to grapple with Hilary Clinton's legacy as First Lady ... Michelle Obama never wants to be seen as the kind of First Lady who is overly involved in the West Wing.

Jodi Kantor

#84. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

John Milton

#85. We see today that there is a growing understanding in the international community that the extremist regime in Tehran is not just Israel's problem, but rather an issue that the entire international community must grapple with.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#86. A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Richard Yates

#87. I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?

Jacqueline Novogratz

#88. Mormonism is the house whose walls I know best. It is the story I am not abandoning because it is the story I choose-and in many ways gas chosen me-again and again to grapple with. Mormonism is my native spiritual language and many of the threads with which my life's tapestry is woven.

Ashley Mae Hoiland

#89. I've, we have in this state, like many other states, we're experiencing an enormous budget deficit that we're trying to grapple with. But we will have progress despite the deficits.

Jennifer Granholm

#90. It is the future, of course, which politicians grapple with, and that is why politics is so disorderly. Only history clears away some of the debris.

Madeleine M. Kunin