All books are the Book of Job, high moral tests and tasks set in fairy tales, landmined and unforgiving as golf greens, as steeplechase and gameboard and obstacle course. 310

-Elkin, Stanley Lawrence
  'The Future of the Novel', in the NewYork Times,17 Feb.

Un grand obstacle au bonheur, c'est de s'attendre a'   un trop grand bonheur. The greatest obstacle to happiness is the expectation of too great a happiness.

-Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de
  Du bonheur.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted and when to be obeyed.

-Hawthorne, Nathaniel
  The Blithedale Romance, ch.2.

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

-Schumpeter,Joseph Alois
  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, ch.18.