When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time. ~Saint Francis de Sales (1567 - 1622)
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man