Quotes About Adversity

Disappointment can drive us, or it can defeat us.

Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." —ALDOUS HUXLEY

The financial crisis caused tremendous pain, but it also made us reevaluate what's most important in our lives—things that have nothing to do with money. It was a time to get back to basics, to the values that have sustained us through troubled times before. For me, it made me remember the days when I was sleeping in my car homeless and searching for a way to change my life. How did I do it? Books!

Remember, it's not conditions but decisions that determine our lives. Disappointment can drive us, or it can defeat us.

I believe that life is always happening for us, not to us!

In every man and woman's life there comes a time of ultimate challenge—a time when every resource we have is tested.

People don't know their true tolerance for risk until they've had a real-life experience taking a significant loss.

They let disappointments destroy them. Disappointment is inevitable when you are attempting to do anything of great scale. Instead, let your disappointments drive you to find new answers; discipline your disappointments

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. —NELSON MANDELA

Encontraremos un camino, o bien lo construiremos. ANÍBAL

People who succeed in life are those who have learned how to take any challenge that life gives them and communicate that experience to themselves in a way that causes them to successfully change things.

They say that faint heart never won fair lady. It is amazing to me how fair ladies are won, so faint are often men's hearts!

But women can bear anything better than desertion. Cruelty is bad, but neglect is worse than cruelty, and desertion worse even than neglect.

A man may have the best of causes, the best of talents, and the best of tempers; he may write as well as Addison, or as strongly as Junius; but even with all this he cannot successfully answer, when attacked by The Jupiter. In such matters it is omnipotent. What the Czar is in Russia, or the mob in America, that The Jupiter is in England. Answer such an article! No, warden; whatever you do, don't do that.

And then he painted to himself a not untrue picture of the probable miseries of a man who begins life too high up on the ladder, — who succeeds in mounting before he has learned how to hold on when he is aloft.

Had he yielded to the claim, the attack would have been as venomous, and very probably would have come from the same quarter

During his prison days his wife had to support herself as she might. The decent articles of furniture which they had put together were sold; she gave up their little house, and, bowed down by misery, she also was brought near to death. When he was liberated he at once got work; but those who have watched the lives of such people know how hard it is for them to recover lost ground.

Though Mr. Crawley was now but a broken reed, and was beneath his feet, yet Mr. Thumble acknowledged to himself that he could not hold his own in debate with this broken reed

As a very young man, Frank Gresham found the life to which he was thus introduced agreeable enough. He consoled himself as best he might for the blue looks with which he was greeted by his own party, and took his revenge by consorting more thoroughly than ever with his political adversaries. Foolishly, like a foolish moth, he flew to the bright light, and, like the moths, of course he burnt his wings.

But of course you must endure the ill-effects of his influence, — be they what they may. When you seceded from our Government you looked for certain adverse consequences. If you did not, where was your self-sacrifice? That such men as Mr. Bonteen should feel that you had scuttled the ship, and be unable to forgive you for doing so, — that is exactly the evil which you knew you must face.

This to me is abominable, but I cannot help myself, unless I resolve to go away and hide myself. That I know cannot be right, and therefore I had better go through it and have done with it. Though I am to be stared at, I shall not be stared at very long. Some other monster will come up and take my place, and I shall be the only person who will not forget it all.

CHAPTER XXIII POOR CANEBACK

But God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.