It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction.

Hard tasks need hard ways.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser

I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance.

I thought I’d solved a problem when really I was creating new ones by taking the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

I've got an impossible job on my hands," he told them, "and if I succeed at it, there's an inconceivable one to follow.

The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them...

Your life’s course should not be determined by doing what’s safe and easy but by reaching for what’s challenging and hard: the classes that seem impossible on the first day, but you study enough to pass … the jobs you’re not quite qualified for, but you work like crazy to acquire the skills … the moments when you feel alone and overwhelmed, but you are brave enough to ask for help.

This is a wrong course the Chinese comrades are trying to lead us on to, it is an opportunist road of vacillation and concessions to the Khrushchev traitor group which finds itself in grave difficulties, and is intriguing in order to escape defeat.

There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.

In life, the path of least resistance is always silence. If you don’t express your feelings and thoughts to others, you don’t have to deal with their reactions to it. You don’t have to feel vulnerable. You don’t risk rejection. But I’ll tell you what: the path of least resistance leads exactly where that ride leads to.” He pointed again to the carts looping around the track.

We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point.