push water uphill | Idiomator

Meaning: (idiomatic)try to achieve a goal despite huge resistance, being anuphill battle1917,Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal - Volume 21, Chilton Company,page161:A Salesman Unaided by the House isPushing Water Uphill.2012, Michael Roe,Marketing Professional Services, Routledge,→ISBN,page 9:Without that commitment you will bepushing water uphillthe whole time and will lose your own, necessary motivation.2013, Zoë C Lloyd,All Patients Great and Small: Tales of a Rural District Nurse, BalboaPress,→ISBN,page28:Persuading Kenny that measuring his calves did not require removal of his underpants and trousers was akin topushing water uphill. He claimed that he couldn't tell what I was saying, which seemed strange as he had no problem deciphering the initial message.2014, Roger Lane-Smith,A Fork in the Road: From Single Partner to Largest Legal Practice in the World‎[1], Icon Books,→ISBN:Our relationship with Donovan Leisure was doing well, in truth because Rod Hills and I worked so hard on it, but often it felt likepushing water uphill.2015, Stephanie Butland,Letters To My Husband, Random House,→ISBN,page237:And they have another drink, and they try to talk about something else, they really do, but it's likepushing water uphill: it won't work, and it's exhausting.

Examples:

No examples available.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).