Quotes about Pressure

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

But in the Gulf you got time. And I'm figuring all the time. I've got to think right all the time. I can't make a mistake. Not a mistake. Not once. Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to do and something to think about besides wondering what the hell's going to happen. Besides wondering what's going to happen to the whole damn thing.

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for your to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.

So let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble onto the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there's not enough time to get everything done that you're convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done.

Because of the pressure to fit in and to please, we can find ourselves making decisions that don't align with our highest good. When we make decisions from the fear of being judged and/or rejected, we doom ourselves to this people-pleasing brand of decision-making.

If a teenage guy tends to overreact when he fails, there is a pretty good chance he thinks his significance is based on success.

I have never had demands on me as acute as when I was a parish priest.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

If someone isn't what others want them to be, the other become angry.

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.

The general systems of money management [today] require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a terrible way to spend your life, but it's very well paid.