Difficult To Solve Quotes & Sayings

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones — Marshall McLuhan

We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions. — Sigmund Freud

Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That i what caricature is all about — Al Hirschfeld

The truly important problems are often the ones you're not even considering, because they appear to be impossible, or, um, actually difficult, or worst of all, not clear how to solve. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

You have perhaps waited for years to be freed from some need. For a long, long time you have looked out from the darkness in search of the light, and have had a difficult problem in life that you have not been able to solve in spite of great efforts. And then, when the time was fulfilled and God's hour had come, did not a solution, light, and deliverance come quite unexpectedly, perhaps quite differently than you thought? — Eberhard Arnold

In science, one should use all available resources to solve difficult problems. One of our most powerful resources is the insight of our colleagues. — Peter Agre

When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem. — Aza Raskin

In real life, according to McNamara, the leader first must discover the problem. He or she must figure out what problem needs to be solved before beginning to make decisions. McNamara explained that identifying the true problem facing an organization often proved to be the most difficult challenge that leaders face. In many instances leaders do not spot a threat until far too late. At times, leaders set out to solve the wrong problem. — Michael A. Roberto

It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down. — Megan Smith

The return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat, the hero himself may find the most difficult requirement of all. For if he has won through, like the Buddha, to the profound repose of complete enlightenment, there is danger that the bliss of this experience may annihilate all recollection of, interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world; or else the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve. — Joseph Campbell

Ted Cruz said he wanted to find a compromise. Ted Cruz said he wanted to bring 11 million people out of the shadows. Ted Cruz said that he wanted immigration reform to pass. Here's the bottom line. I tried to solve a very difficult issue, and we tried to produce the best and most conservative bill possible in a Senate controlled by Harry Reid at the time, and then send it over to the House and have them, conservatives, make it even better. — Marco Rubio

Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life ... (How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?) — Walker Percy

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them. — Eugene Paul Wigner

A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate's knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth. — Ben Horowitz

You have to ask good questions. "What can I do to improve?" or "How can I find a better job?" or "How can I be grateful that I lost this job?" Because inside of every problem is the seed of a "difficult gratitude problem" and it always improves your life to solve those problems. — James Altucher

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it,or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing. — Henry Miller

The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny. — Hope Davis

I was elected to solve problems, and I don't think it's conservative to have bad roads; I don't think it's conservative to have bad schools. I don't think it's conservative to have to go through budget crises every two years. So I'm taking the difficult issues straight on. That's what I was elected to do. — Brian Sandoval

When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy. — Madeleine Albright

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. — Douglas Coupland

Notes Day wasn't an end point but a beginning - a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company's future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought problems to the surface - but we still had the hard work in front of us. Notes Day didn't solve anything all by itself. But it shifted our culture - repaired it, even - in ways that will make us better as we go forward. — Ed Catmull

True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict. — Immanuel Kant

It's always helpful to have somebody help buoy you in difficult times and problem-solve with and to share the marvelous moments with as well. — Jane Poynter

It's more difficult to create the problem than to solve it. All the person trying to solve the problem has to do is always respect the problem's creator. — Keigo Higashino

The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve. — Fareed Zakaria

women live the lie from birth on, and then one day they realize that it's too late for them, they're too old to write a book or solve a difficult problem in math, they'll never learn to sing or play the piano, they showed such promise early on. so they run to the priest, their voices take on a hysterical edge, like the one mine has right now, and the priest tells them they have lived righteously and their reward will be in heaven, and he could certainly use someone in the kitchen for the potluck on Sunday night. — Haven Kimmel

When I got home, I thought about the fact that Einstein supposedly used to stock his wardrobe with the same suits and shoes so he'd never have to think about what he was going to wear. I lack the intellect it takes to solve problems that way. I've advanced nothing in the field of psychology, and my paper on PTSD was given little attention; I wrote that psychological disorders with a genetic link, such as borderline personality disorder, might seem impossible to treat, while PTSD, which is based in trauma that has been experienced, seems easy to tackle, at least to the layperson. The opposite is true. It can be difficult to find the right medication for genetic disorders, but they can be sufficiently treated. Conversely, PTSD never goes away. One might think that our genes are so elementary that we cannot escape them, but our experiences have the ability to do far greater damage. — Bryan Way

We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve. — William Duncan Silkworth

Developing a skill is painful, though. It is difficult. And that's part of the satisfaction. You will only find meaning in what you struggle with. What you struggle to get good at next may not seem the exact right thing for you at first. With time and effort, however, you will discover new possibilities in yourself-an ability to solve problems, for instance, or to communicate, or to create beauty ... — Atul Gawande

Nothing whatsoever, not even the existence of God to His lovers, can be proved, but that every man, if he is to live at all finely, must deliberately adopt certain assertions as true, and those assertions should, for the sake of the enrichment of the human race, always be creative ones. He may, as life goes on, modify his beliefs, but he must never modify them on the side of destruction. It may be difficult, in the face of the problem of human suffering, to believe in God ... but if you destroy God you do not solve your problem but merely leave yourself alone with it ... A ghastly loneliness. — Elizabeth Goudge

The poverty of the West is far more difficult to solve than the poverty of India. — Mother Teresa

The reward for being a good problem solver is to be heaped with more and more difficult problems to solve — R. Buckminster Fuller

Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread - for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to solve. — Jack Williamson

Whatever your problem, no matter how difficult, you can release spiritual power sufficient to solve your problem. The secret is
pray and believe. — Norman Vincent Peale

So I think that is one of the reasons we can face some regional problems, which are very difficult, very dramatic and is necessary to have instruments to solve these problems. NATO is such instrument. — Aleksander Kwasniewski

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history. — Steven Johnson

It must be said that parental decisions are difficult, and that children often do "grow out of it." But it almost never hurts to try to help them grow out of it or to look more closely at the problem. And while children often "grow out of it," often they do not; and as with so many problems, the longer children's problems are ignored, the larger they become and the more painful and difficult to solve. — M. Scott Peck

Most people will solve the problems they know how to solve. Roughly speaking they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact problems for your company but they're difficult problems. — Keith Rabois

After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie [Munger] and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we have concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers. — Warren Buffett

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

I don't think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail. — Fidel Castro

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. [Fermat's] Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this. — Andrew John Wiles

It really helps you to go through difficult situations by just thinking about it as being a big amount of work which you have to solve how to do. For example, I don't feel very inspired when I act, I just act. That's it. — Isabelle Huppert

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That's why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[Descartes] And so it was he who discovered the gulf between the subjective or ideal and the objective or real. He clothed this insight in the form of a doubt concerning the existence of the external world; but by his inadequate solution of such doubt, namely that God Almighty would surely not deceive us, he has shown how profound the problem is and how difficult it is to solve. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Continuing on my theme of backing inclusive innovations, I am optimistic of the success of Uniphore. Man-machine communication is one of the more complex problems to solve. Uniphore's vision lends possibility of finding a solution to this very difficult problem, and the company has already made substantial progress. — Kris Gopalakrishnan

Ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in an original and creative way. — Pearl Zhu

What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it's too late? — Elizabeth Gilbert

When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution - We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.
On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry - the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth - from the worm to the dinosaur. — Joseph Lewis

...When you're mad it becomes easy to solve many difficult problems. Madness is a pair of Arabian Nights shoes; if you put them on you can leap clear of thousands of bogus questions.'
'Bogus questions? What exactly do you mean by bogus?'
'For instance, what will people say? What will happen in the future? — Rabindranath Tagore

The problem of race is deep and wide and requires seismic change. But if we look to government to solve it, we might as well feel hopeless. If we look corporate America to solve it, we'll be waiting a long, long time. And if we agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who tentatively suggests that "the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us," then we will truly despair, for we know how well that has worked. If we follow that track, we'll quickly add in disbelief, as he did, "Or perhaps not."

As I've said, the problem of race is not "out there." It's "in here," in the human heart. And though there is no task in heaven or on earth more difficult than changing the human heart,I believe in the one who can do it. It requires a supernatural solution.

Yes, I believe in God. You see, I know how God can change a person's heart. — Benjamin Watson

Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. "When I finish this process," he explained, "I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch." In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply perform calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. "I want my students to construct their own understanding," he explains, "so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem. — Ken Bain

Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated. — Erich Fromm

What MySmartPrice does is help the user solve two problems - what to buy and where to buy. In cases where like-to-like product comparison is difficult, for instance in footwear and fashion, it has a range of filters such as best discounts that help it come up with a consolidated bestseller list with popular products and their specifications. — Anonymous

All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life. — Walker Percy

There is no problem more difficult to solve than that created by ourselves. — Felix Alba-Juez

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. - A stitch in time saves nine. — Donella H. Meadows

The truly curious will be increasingly in demand. Employers are looking for people who can do more than follow procedures competently or respond to requests; who have a strong intrinsic desire to learn, solve problems and ask penetrating questions. They may be difficult to manage at times, these individuals, for their interests and enthusiasms can take them along unpredictable paths, and they don't respond well to being told what to think. But for the most part, they will be worth the difficulty. — Ian Leslie

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. — Henry David Thoreau

it is difficult to solve a problem that you are almost entirely ignorant about. You cannot work for peace while ignoring violence any more than a doctor can create treatments while refusing to study disease. — Rory Miller

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants, while he actually wants
what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own. — Erich Fromm

It's too difficult to convey tone in electronic communication. And we can solve this my friends. All we need is some new fonts. 'Great party Arj. Best party ever.' What a jerk! How do you know he wasn't being sincere, Arj? Because he wrote it in Sarcastica! If he had enjoyed himself, he would have used Good Times Roman. — Arj Barker

Just for today, i'll allow many things to be out of my control ... This can be very difficult for many of us. When someone tells us about something bad going on, we tend to want to solve the problem, to exercise some level of control over it. If someone is misbehaving, we often feel obligated to make that person change his or her behavior. But many, many things in this life are not under our control, nor should they be - and we shouldn't try to exert our influence trying to control them. Sometimes we need to accept that this is someone else's problem, and that person is able to deal with it, or that this is an issue that's going to take some time to resolve, or that this really, truly is none of my business. There are plenty of things in life that go on quite well without our involvement, and when we try to push ourselves in, we can add stress to our own lives and complicate the situations. So today, I'm going to let some things go, for they aren't my affair. — Tom Walsh

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us. — Antonio R. Damasio

The fear among economists across the political spectrum was that we were rapidly plummeting toward a second Great Depression. So in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps, largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve. — Barack Obama

The life and friends are two connected things. As life is one we get friends for once too. There could be so many things between friends sometime we get angry on. But If you don't solve and remain angry then that will be your big mistake and it could be just because of your ego. One side can take step to solve it but your ego (that is not fully ego but a kind of ego for that you think you were right at that moment and another one should take step first to feel apologize) never let you to do so. You should be apologize to be a good friend. Now you may think why to apologize if another one doesn't care at all. Then whats the difference between you and that one. You may leave it by thinking you dont need or you may proceed to solve it. It shouldn't be difficult to apologize with friends. — Pawan Mehra

Psychologist Robert Zajonc takes this claim one step further: "For most decisions, it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been any prior cognitive process whatsoever."28 It isn't that the decisions people make are irrational; it's that the process by which decisions are made are utterly unlike the step-by-step rational process that might be used to solve, say, a math problem. Decisions are typically made in the unconscious mind, by means of some unknown process. Indeed, — William B. Irvine

I have not conceived my mission to be that of a knight-errant wandering everywhere to deliver people from difficult situations.
My humble occupation has been to show people how they can solve their own difficulties. — Mahatma Gandhi

One of the high spots of the decade for me was offering the bill which culminated in the tax act of 1986, which brought rates down. That was the most difficult problem to solve: how to make the tax system of the United States more fair. We tried to make it simpler, but we failed on that one. — Donald T. Regan