Quotes About Adversity

Life hits you hard. But it takes you three seconds to decide if you are a superhero or not. I am.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

The difficulties we face originate from one of three sources. Some are sent to us by the Lord to test our faith, others are the result of Satan's attacks, and still others are due to our own sinful choices.

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.

Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life.

Three surgeries on the same limb, that's a tall order.

I've crashed my car three times.

I almost went broke. I didn't file bankruptcy, but I had some miserable times there for two or three years.

When you overcome a profound loss, or there's some catalyst in your life that shifts everything, if you're able to take it in stride and heal, it can make for much more three-dimensional and empathetic people.

I had a serious childhood illness - sort of like spinal meningitis - that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn't be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

I had no idea what I was going to do when they threw me out of school.

I might have been a jockey, you know. I started by riding horses bareback and holding on to the mane before they finally threw me off.

I've had two fights in my life. Both times I threw one punch, and both times I broke my hand! I really am a stranger to the world of fighting.

I've broken my hand, I threw my back out once, and then I've had some pretty bad cuts, but that's been about it. I've been able to avoid most of the really, really bad injuries and career-ending injuries.

I'm quite laid-back but some people say I'm unemotional. I don't get carried away with success and similarly I don't get depressed when something bad happens. I didn't take it personally when rival fans threw banana skins at me when I was playing for Liverpool. I can't control 50,000 idiots shouting at me, so why would it bother me?

Willie Roaf kicked my butt a couple of times. Larry Allen was a guard, but one time in San Francisco he took me with one hand and threw me out of the play. Walter Jones was pretty tough, too.

I was sparring with Dan Christison, a big heavyweight. I threw a leg kick and broke my fibula. Before the Florian training camp.

I fought Mark Hunt and I got caught with a shot that he threw. That's kind of like getting caught by a submission by me.

I was, like, 12 or 13; the first hip hop song I tried to rapping to was Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop,' and my English was so bad, but learning to rap to different songs really helped me with my pronunciation, and looking at the lyrics on Rap Genius and stuff like that.

I grew up moving from one council flat to another and finished up in a three-bedroom semi-detached on a council estate in Cranford, a suburb of Hounslow. This was in the days when there was still rationing, and we had to be thrifty.

I thrive on obstacles. If I'm told that it can't be told, then I push harder.

Under pressure is something I thrive on.

Obviously, teams start wearing down. But that's kind of when you thrive, when the other team starts to get tired.

You really have to act your pants off to stay alive. I thrive on that; I rise to the occasion of the circumstances.