No Easy Road Quotes & Sayings

The right road is rarely the easy road. And no war is ever fought without casualties."
"Is that what this is?" Sophie asked. "A war?"
"Unfortunately, yes. A quiet war to stop a louder one from raging. You may hate me for asking this of him, but this is the cold reality we all face. We cannot control the actions of others, nor stop them from disappointing us. We can only use the anger and pain to fuel us. To help us rise above. — Shannon Messenger

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can't suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy - or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn't shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. — Dorothea Lasky

What my father especially taught me was to not always take the safe road, the easy road. If you are going to do good work, you have to risk failing badly. — Natasha Richardson

If you drive fast enough on a rough road you glide over the bumps and skim the pot holes - it's a smooth ride. If you charge without fear over boulders and beach debris it's the same as running on hard flat sand. The only problem is slowing down, or stopping. — Matt Padwick

When you start playing music when you're quite young, it's easy to stay young. And then you're touring, and you see people who've been on the road for 10 or 15 years and they just haven't grown up at all. — Charlie Fink

A red map isn't easy to follow. Any document made of blood and bones is tricky. Wrong turns are easily made, and there are often piles of stones in the road. A person has to disregard time and sorrow and all the damage done. If you follow, if you dare, the thread always leads to whomever or whatever you've forgotten ... — Alice Hoffman

The road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important for all to understand - though all change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others. — Robert Kennedy

My ma told me that there isn't anything in this life worth having that comes easy. She told me that every road I walk down's gonna have a price. But what she didn't tell me and what I learned since I've been here is that if you don't choose the road you're gonna walk, sooner or later someone else'll do that choosing for you. — Victoria Forester

It gives me great pleasure to converse with the aged. They have been over the road that all of us must travel, and know where it is rough and difficult and where it is level and easy. — Plato

Be strong. Be diligent. Be conscientious. There is never anything to be gained by taking the easy road. — Julia Quinn

SEEK MY FACE more and more. You are really just beginning your journey of intimacy with Me. It is not an easy road, but it is a delightful and privileged way: a treasure hunt. I am the Treasure, and the Glory of My Presence glistens and shimmers along the way. Hardships are part of the journey too. I mete them out ever so carefully, in just the right dosage, with a tenderness you can hardly imagine. Do not recoil from afflictions, since they are among My most favored gifts. Trust Me and don't be afraid, for I am your Strength and Song. My heart says of you, "Seek his face!" Your face, LORD, I will seek. PSALM 27 : 8 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4 : 7 "Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The LORD, the LORD, is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation." ISAIAH 12 : 2 — Sarah Young

I'm so sorry because it's still not easy. You have a long, hard, terrible road ahead. There are lots of ways to travel it, but they all suck and they all involve letting go. — Laurie Frankel

She's got a man's nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else's tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king's mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair's all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She's got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she's laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good. — Catherynne M Valente

We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all. Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign. — Nelson Mandela

I realized that I was still caught on the ring road
on that, thank goodness, forgiving ring road
but that eventually, at some point, everyone needs to get off, including me. It is easy to coast and even easier to mock the signs, but reading them, really reading them, and then making the largest decision there is, the greatest decision to which all others defer and are tied back to
to know who we are, what we stand for, and for what we are responsible
to read the signs and then choose the right way ... well, that's hard. — Carolyn Weber

Doris Day started performing at a young age, had a tough road to success, and once she achieved it delivered the goods 100 percent and brilliantly, always making difficult work look as easy as breathing. — Robert Osborne

A little way down the road I turned, and saw how his wife and daughter took him up. And I thought to myself: no, 'tis not all roses when one goes a-wandering. At the next place I came to I learned that he had been with the army, as quartermaster-sergeant; then he went mad over a lawsuit he lost, and was shut up in an asylum for some time. Now in the spring his trouble broke out again; perhaps it was my coming that had given the final touch. But the lightning insight in his eyes at the moment when the madness came upon him! I think of him now and again; he was a lesson to me. 'Tis none so easy to judge of men, who are wise or mad. And God preserve us all from being known for what we are! — Knut Hamsun

We have a long road ahead of us because of our pasts. We both still struggle on a daily basis, and I can't swear to you that will ever stop. But it doesn't feel impossible when I'm with you. You make me smile and laugh. You make things right even when the world feels completely wrong. Sarah, it's easy to remember why I should open my eyes every morning when the first thing they see is you. — Anonymous

I'm on the road, Butte is 58 miles away, and I'm driving 85 mph. So I should be there in an hour. Oh, if only love were so easy to calculate. — Jarod Kintz

Find your true path. It's so easy to become someone we don't want to be, without even realizing it's happening. We are created by the choices we make every day. And if we take action in order to please some authority figure, we'll suddenly wake up down the road and say, This isn't me. I never wanted to be this person. — Richard Carlson

In the early days I was on the road 45-50 weeks a year, driving from gig to gig 6-8 weeks in a row. Not everyone can do that. The show becomes the easy part. Tt's the life on the road that is the hardest ... and you can't get any good at standup unless you do the road. — Henry Cho

My son traveled the world with me on every tour. He wasn't a lover of school, so it was easy with him. I had a tutor on the road, keep him at the same level, so when he'd pop back home he'd go right back in. — Gloria Estefan

They'll [China] probably be a fully developed nation. The road there just is not going to be that easy. You're going from a macromanaged, top-down economy to a market-managed, micromanaged type of economy, with all the potential corruption issues, SOE [state-owned enterprise] reform, and market reform that come with it. — Jamie Dimon

I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from an obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle. — Edmund Burke

Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road - so hard to shake off. So easy to get back. — Barbara Kingsolver

He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet. — Patricia A. McKillip

It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future - to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive? — William Dean Howells

That's the beauty of country music - you have to get out there and earn it and work hard. And when you're on the road with big name acts, you realize there's no easy way to the 'Promised Land' in this business. — Luke Bryan

The time is short and the hills is dark and I's got miles to go before I sleeps. Is is no easy road. — Ian McDonald

The easy, gentle, and sloping path ... is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road. — Michel De Montaigne

I step outside, easy at first... there is noise; I don't hear it. There are people; I don't see them... I see the water; I am alongside it. There is a big hill; I conquer it. A mile of grass; I fly across it. With each step I am stronger, and then faster. My body engages; I am really flying; I am one with the road, but I no longer feel it. With every step forward I am faster and freer. Nothing can touch me; no one can find me. What I find is the truth. I find myself... I am a runner. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

It's easy to forget to look up when all you do is focus on the road straight ahead. — Jessi Kirby

Then up he got with a light heart, free from all his troubles, and walked on till he reached his mother's house, and told her how very easy the road to good luck was. — Jacob Grimm

There is no easy way to the journey of life. Those who follow the easy road cannot fully appreciate life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Evil can be got very easily and exists in quantity: the road to her is very smooth, and she lives near by. But between us and virtue the gods have placed the sweat of our brows; the road to her is long and steep, and it is rough at first; but when a man has reached the top, then she is easy to attain, although before she was hard. — Hesiod

Vomit began to spill out of me like pea soup, splattering the road with champagne and caviar, long island iced teas, of bacon appetizers and croissants, and a perfectly grilled filet mignonette. It had gone down easy, among the kiss ups of the lawyer world, but spewed out nastily and hard, in the company of a cheater. — Keira D. Skye

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp.
The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes? — Debra Holland

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives. — Freeman Dyson

You are not Melusina, rising from a fountain to easy happiness. You will not be a beautiful woman at court with nothing to do but make magic. The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win. — Philippa Gregory

JESUS beckons HIS followers to a path that's far from the easy road. It's a path filled with adventure, uncertainty, and unlimited possibilities - the only path that can fulfill the deepest longings and desires of your heart. This is the barbarian way: to give your heart to the only ONE who can make you fully alive. To unleash the untamed faith within. To be consumed by the presence of a passionate and compassionate GOD. To go where HE sends, no matter the cost. The Barbarian Way — Erwin Raphael McManus

They didn't want to take the crew-cab back to town, because they didn't want to sit where those guys had sat, so they rode the backhoe, as before, Westwood driving, Reacher and Chang face to face above his head, but this time on the dirt road. Which was slow, but more comfortable. They parked in the dealer's lot. The salesman came out. The backhoe was examined. It was a little stained by crushed wheat, and a little scratched on the sides. There was a little dirt caked on. And the front bucket had a dimple, where the bullet had struck. Not new anymore. Not exactly. Reacher gave the guy five grand from their leftover money. Easy come, easy go. Then — Lee Child

You know, I've wondered if it's more painful to lose someone you love to death or to lose someone you love because she no longer loves you back." "I don't know," I said. "On the surface, it seems an easy question. It should be so much easier to lose someone who doesn't love you, because why would you want to be with someone who doesn't want you? But rejection's not an east road. A part of you always wonders what makes you so unlovable. — Richard Paul Evans

Humans are often more stupid than they realize. Because of our weaknesses are so easily exploited. Just like a child's clumsy fingers messing up the buttons on a shirt. It's easy to mock someone who buttoned his shirt wrongly. It's easy to mock someone who had buttoned wrongly yet remains oblivious to it. But there are also people who completely fail to realize that they buttoned them all wrongly. Just a moment's error, a wrong choice, traps us on the road of no return. But who can reprimand them for that? Why can't humans be lonely? Why can't we yearn for those right by our side? On such a cold lonely night, who can stand to bear it alone? Imagine the fright when we realize the severity of our mistakes. Whoever said love was a happy affair? — Yuuri Eda

Imagine that you're an extremely modern car, equipped with a greater number of options and functions than most cars. You're faster and higher performance. You're very lucky. But it's not easy. Because no one knows exactly the number of options you have or what they enable you to do. Only you can know. And speed can be dangerous. Like when you're eight, you don't know how to drive. There are many things you have to learn: how to drive when it's wet, when it's snowy, to look out for other cars and respect them, to rest when you've been driving for too long. That's what it means to be a grown up.' I'm thirteen and I can see that I'm not managing to grow up in the right way: I can't understand the road signs, I'm not in control of my vehicle, I keep taking the wrong turnings and most of the time I feel like I'm stuck on the dodgems rather than on a race track. — Delphine De Vigan

There is...no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living...They were to be the spearhead of good against evil. — J.B. Phillips

There is no straight and easy road to the city of modernity. Whatever the main road chosen, there will be many tempting and ruinous side roads; there will be many marshes and wastes on either side, and many wrecked aspirations will lie there, rusting and gathering dust. Those who arrive at the city will discover it to be quite different from the destination which they and their ancestors originally sought. Yet, some roads are better than others; some destinations are better than others.


Even if none is perfect and none corresponds to the voyagers' hope on starting, some of the destinations will turn out to have been worth the travail, worth the effort of the voyagers and of their friends who helped them on their way. — Edward Shils

There is no short and easy road, no magic cure for those ills which have afflicted mankind from the dawn of history. — Frank B. Kellogg

In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common. — Steven Tyler

There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony. — Anthony Trollope

All my work and all my dealings with people feel very easy. Actually, everything is simple. There is one straight road - if you open your eyes you can go along it. I don't see the need to search for all sorts of clever short cuts. Happiness and sadness are both on the road - there is no road that avoids them - but peace is found only on this road, nowhere else. — Rabindranath Tagore

Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy - it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy road to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you felt intensely lukewarm? eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with, don't they? — Thomas Pynchon

Life is complex.
Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another ... The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness. — M. Scott Peck

It means there are no obstacles which our Savior's love cannot overcome, and that to him, mountains of difficulty are as easy as an asphalt road! — Hannah Hurnard

When we want something that bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road. — Bob Goff

The road I've taken to this point has not been easy. Being back on HBO is a big thing, but fighting on HBO in my hometown is huge. To be great you have to fight the best. Chad has beaten the best so these are the type fights I want to take. I will put on a great show for all the fans that come out to Oracle Arena. — Andre Ward

Driving in someone elses lane is easy, but remaining in your own seems to be the most challenging self discipline. No matter how big the highway, imagine yours is a singular road traveled in one direction - you're own. — T.F. Hodge

Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night. — Haruki Murakami

Take those road hazards- the potholes, ruts, detours, and all the rest- as evidence that you were on the right route. It's when you find yourself on that big, broad, easy road that you ought to worry. — Joni Eareckson Tada

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is. — Barack Obama

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another. — Flann O'Brien

If I have even just a little sense, I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it. Keeping to the main road is easy, But people love to be sidetracked. — Laozi

In Brussels, you are able to have a lot of appointments in a day. In Paris, you can have one, two, maybe three, but you spend all your time on the road, in the car or in the suburbs. In Brussels, everything is easy. It's not a very big city, and the people are very quiet and warm. — Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

The road to Hades is easy to travel; at any rate men pass away with their eyes shut. — Bion Of Borysthenes

If life's journey was intended to be easy, we would have been given directions. However, since we have no road map, we must climb the highest mountain and forge the deepest streams with love in our souls, in the hope that our own journey will give us peace within... — Virginia Alison

A man journeyed to a place
Where the road caused him to ponder,
Should he travel the wide, clear road?
Or should he venture up the other?
The wide road was more often traveled,
It was level and easy and clear.
The narrow one seemed barely a path,
With very few footprints there.
His senses said to choose for ease
And walk where many have wandered.
But the map he held in his hand
Showed the narrow going somewhere grander.
In life we will all come to a point
Where a decision must be made.
Will we choose to walk with comfort's guide?
Or journey the narrow path God says? — Lysa TerKeurst

Ask any dreamer, it's not an easy road,
But to them; they never questioned, what they'd always known. — Nikki Rowe

Our choices are defined not by others, although those others would comb through it with a fine tooth pick. But in all honesty, we learn from each choice we make. Thing's that wouldn't be taught by any other. We might take the easy road and not work as we would if we chose the harder road, where we would work to the bone. Our choices impact our lives, no-one else's. And we have to face what is on the other side of that choice whether easy or hard because we chose it. Choices suck sometimes but in the end, it is a new life lesson learned. — Melina Turner

Taking the high road is hard work-- walking uphill requires strength and effort. Anyone can take the low road--walking downhill is easy. — Rachel St. John-Gilbert

The way that I am now, I don't want to accept mediocrity. I don't want to accept the easy road. — Joe Nichols

It's not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It's going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I'm not going to let the past destroy my future. I'm pressing on. I'm straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me. — Joel Osteen

It's easy to point out someone else's mistake, harder to recognize your own. Especially because most people - except the lucky few like ourselves - are forced to live with their mistakes. So they learn to justify their mistakes, build on them, until they can look back and convince themselves that their mistake was inevitable all along, a good choice, in fact. An unwed teenage mother can look back at her unexpected pregnancy fondly six years down the road once the child's out of her hair and in school all day. She wouldn't dare go back and fix that mistake because it's become part of her life. — Andrea Lochen

I went to Louisiana Tech, which is just down the road from where we lived. It was an easy college to get into. — Jeff Mangum

Look to your right ... It is the path back home. If you choose, you can take it. It is safe, easy, and comfortable. You do not have to work out or fight or do anything else you do not want to ...
Or you can keep moving forward. I will not lie to you. I cannot predict what may become of you. It will require a lot of training, hard work, study, and danger. But in the very end, you will know strength. I swear it. You might just become someone who will make a difference in the world. — Wesley Chu

The road to Hades is easy to travel. — Wilfred Bion

The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. — Rachel Carson

The road to success is not easy to navigate, but with hard work, drive and passion, it's possible to achieve the American dream. — Tommy Hilfiger

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn't. All that space, waiting. — S.M. Hulse

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different. — Lauren Oliver

Our personal journey is rarely easy, and our global journey is even less so. Because everything is interdependent, we have to work on both of these levels at once. Trying to change society without deeply understanding our heartmind won't work. Your own road home can never be separated from society's journey. We need a unifying theory and language that allow us to link the lessons of our personal journey with the situation facing our world. The important question then, a question laced with a gorgeous irony, is, "How do we get home from here?" Or, maybe more appropriate, "How do we get here from here? — Ethan Nichtern

At one time or another, we all stand at the crossroads and at the fork in the road.We can go back where it's comfortable, predictable and easy. Or we can go forward. If you go back, my friend, you will miss the ride of your life! — Donna Schultz