Quotes About Adversity

there's nothing wrong with being scared to death. It can happen to the best. What counts is hanging on, somehow staying in control and doing what you know you should.

Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts not amid joy.

Experience is the extract of suffering.

Please do not misunderstand me," he once told Wilson. "We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.

Above all, he seems to have taken from Socrates the notion that man's freedom depends completely on the state of our soul, not on some physical or material condition; and on our capacity to endure adversity and to be indifferent to our outward fate.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability is in the opponent. —SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

How does he learn to take that crucial step? Does he learn it the hard way, that if he is going to get along he has to go along, as Pufendorf suggested? Or is there a simpler, more uplifting way, by which we learn that virtue can be its own reward?

My wind is turned to bitter north, That was so soft a south before.

De levenswijsheid van een grijsaard kun je lezen uit zijn rimpels, de moed van een veldheer uit zijn verwondingen. Zo is ieder met wat hem getekend heeft getooid.

Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

By the mistaken benevolence of deceased relatives both young men were placed out of reach of hunger, and so, meditating high achievements, idled their time pleasantly away, and revelled in the careless joys of a Bohemianism devoid of the sharp reasoning of adversity.

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.

Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.

When we are strongest- who draws back? Most merry- who falls down laughing? When we are very bad,- what can they do to us?

On highroads on winter nights, without roof, without clothes, without bread, a voice gripped my frozen heart: "Weakness or strength: there you are, it's strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse." In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome-to be got over.

But here, under the wide blue skies, the wind was the flood. Everyone drowned in it.

The faithfulness of God is a truth to be confessed by us not only when we are at ease, but also when we are smarting under the sharpest rebuke.

I've lived under a desk my whole life and my mother lost her teeth.

It was one of Diego Alatriste's virtues that he could make friends in Hell.