by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
We Can Deal With Life and Struggles When We Learn to Be REAL
Life is difficult for all of us at some stage on the journey but we can make it even more difficult for ourselves when we don’t ACCEPT life as it is and create unnecessary friction, frustration, and even misery.
When it comes to growing real and the kind of REALNESS that I talk about in my books and help my coaching clients to tap into, gaining this kind of acceptance emerges from three vital stages of growth:
- Awareness: Deconstructing the ego and seeing reality clearly.
- Acceptance: Integrating the shadow parts of ourselves with compassion.
- Action: Trusting ourselves and life enough to take authentic steps forward without F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).
Below are 100 famous quotes about life and struggles, divided into these three transformative stages.
Each one designed to inspire your journey toward genuine wholeness and motivate you to go deeper into your own journey of growth.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
100 Powerful Quotes About Life & Struggles: Table of Contents
- We Can Deal With Life and Struggles When We Learn to Be REAL
- Awareness (Deconstruct Ego)
- Acceptance (Integrate Shadow)
- Action (Trust Self & Life)
- 100 Quotes about Life & Struggles: Final Reflection
Awareness (Deconstruct Ego)
Seeing Through Illusion, Fear, Pride, and False Identity
The first step of the journey is about learning to see clearly and to stop holding ourselves back from life by seeing what our unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ wants us to see.
The following quotes will help you to start seeing life and its struggles with a bit more clarity:
1. “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle
2. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
3. “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” – Carl Jung
4. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” – Seneca
5. “It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
6. “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” – Robertson Davies
7. “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.” – Epictetus
8. “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” – Leonardo da Vinci
9. “People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
10. “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” – Lao Tzu
11. “You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.” – Norman Vincent Peale
12. “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” – Oscar Wilde
13. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
14. “No man is free who is not master of himself.” – Epictetus
15. “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” – Samuel Johnson
16. “To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to keep your soul alive.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
17. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
18. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
19. “The ego is a veil between humans and God.” – Rumi
20. “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” – Lao Tzu
21. “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” – Marcus Aurelius
22. “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.” – Buddha
23. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” – Michel de Montaigne
24. “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” – Ernest Hemingway
25. “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln
26. “Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.” – Thomas Merton
27. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau
28. “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.” – Carl Jung
29. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
30. “Where your fear is, there is your task.” – Carl Jung
31. “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.” – Carl Jung
32. “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” – William James
33. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Khalil Gibran
Check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to raise awareness of how you’re holding yourself back from life.
Acceptance (Integrate Shadow)
Embracing Pain, Imperfection, Humanity, and Wholeness
Once we’ve raised awareness and started to see ourselves and life in truth then it’s time to go into ACCEPTANCE.
If we don’t actually accept what we’ve become aware of then we’ll just keep going round in circles and will never be able to make any lasting changes in our lives.
The following quotes will help you to see that acceptance can truly lead to growth:
34. “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi
35. “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.” – Brené Brown
36. “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung
37. “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” – Charles Bukowski
38. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling
39. “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey
40. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” – Oscar Wilde
41. “We cannot selectively numb emotions; when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” – Brené Brown
42. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
– Carl Rogers
43. “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and -got back up again.” – Nelson Mandela
44. “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein
45. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
46. “You cannot heal what you refuse to confront.” – Unknown
47. “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”- Maya Angelou
48. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
49. “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung
50. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
51. “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” – Cormac McCarthy
52. “The only way out is through.” – Robert Frost
53. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
54. “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” – Maya Angelou
55. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
56. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” – Viktor Frankl
57. “The strongest people are not those who show strength in front of us but those who win battles we know nothing about.” – Jonathan Harnisch
58. “Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.” – Tori Amos
59. “No feeling is final.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
60. “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.”
– Nicholas Sparks
61. “There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveller.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
62. “We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.” – Ernest Hemingway
63. “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” – Paul Boese
64. “Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” – Albert Camus
65. “The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” – Robert Jordan
66. “Every human walks around with a certain kind of sadness.” – Brad Pitt
If you want to start cultivating unconditional self-acceptance then Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World can help you.
Action (Trust Self & Life)
Courage, Faith, Discipline, Movement, and Living Fully
Once we’ve cultivated Awareness and Acceptance then we’re finally start ready to taking REAL ACTION – action that’s aligned with who we really are and who we want to become.
Real action always involves a degree of TRUST because it means accepting reality as it is which means that we can’t control or guarantee anything but that we can always grow real no matter what happens.
The following quotes will help you move forward and go deeper into trusting yourself and life:
67. “Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
68. “Fortune favours the brave.” – Virgil
69. “Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
70. “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
71. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
72. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
73. “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
74. “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd
75. “The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost
76. “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” – Henry Ford
77. “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
78. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
79. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
80. “Do not pray for an easy life; pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” – Bruce Lee
81. “The future depends on what you do today.” – Mahatma Gandhi
82. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill
83. “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” – Benjamin Spock
84. “Leap, and the net will appear.” – John Burroughs
85. “Nothing will work unless you do.” – Maya Angelou
86. “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall
87. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
88. “Dreams don’t work unless you do.” – John C. Maxwell
89. “Energy and persistence conquer all things.” – Benjamin Franklin
90. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
91. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
92. “Great acts are made up of small deeds.” – Lao Tzu
93. “Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.” – Abraham Lincoln
94. “The only limit to our realisation of tomorrow is our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
95. “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis
96. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
97. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
98. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Confucius
99. “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” – Japanese Proverb
100. – “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin
100 Quotes about Life & Struggles: Final Reflection
Life struggles have a way of stripping away illusion and returning us to what is REAL:
Awareness helps us see through the ego and the stories that keep us trapped.
Acceptance allows us to integrate pain, shadow, and humanity instead of fighting ourselves.
Action asks us to trust life enough to move forward despite uncertainty.
The journey through struggle is not about becoming ‘perfect’ but about becoming real and – often – the most powerful transformations begin the moment we stop running from ourselves and start walking through life with honesty, courage, and trust.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to face life head-on and to start building a sense of flow instead of struggling unnecessarily then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get in the zone.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
