Quotes About Adversity

The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things…. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.

The truth is that life will break us and burn us at some point on the journey. This is not pessimistic or cynical but descriptive of the geography of being alive. It is part of how we are transformed by the journey. Yet when we're broken or burned by events, we feel betrayed by God. When we're broken or burned by people, we feel betrayed by other souls.

Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.

there are countless stories of people whose lives truly find their meaning after events force them to give up careers that they have been devoted to.

If we could see ourselves from far enough away, we would seem like a colony of insects running into things repeatedly: thousands of little determined beings butting into obstacles, shaking our little heads and bodies, and running into things again.

we must turn water into air in order to live, which for us means turning our experience into something that can sustain us. It means turning pain into wonder, heartache into joy.

how to feel the pain of living without denying it and without letting that pain define us. Ultimately, no matter the burden we are given—apartheid, cancer, abuse, depression, addiction—once whittled to the bone, we are faced with a never-ending choice: to become the wound or to heal.

The Art of Facing Things What people have forgotten is what every salmon knows. —ROBERT CLARK

We have been shirking too long, and that's unworthy of a great civilization. To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

although we hear the buzz in our ears and the crashing of jaws at our heels, we can look around as those who are nibbled but unbroken, from the shimmering vantage of the living. Here may not be the cleanest, newest place, but that clean timeless place that vaults on either side of this one is no place at all.

Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be "processed," converted into humor.

All the hardships I have endured were merely rehearsals to prepare me for this devastating pain.

Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you'? The wise words

Well, what was wrong with it? We don't know, says James. That's a stupid rotten answer. Life is sometimes rotten and stupid.

I learned to recognize failure.

Line cooks are the heroes.

It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.

When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It's an awful thing to watch. It's awful when it happens to you.

It is one of the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad.

Todos os dias acordava, ficava um bocadinho na cama, chegava ao trabalho – onde o serviço já ia a todo o vapor – e procurava alguém para ser despedido.