Quotes About Adversity

Anger is the prelude to courage.

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate.

Ours was an extraordinary generation, born into a devastated world, exhausted from six years of total war. Sixty million died. Nowadays the young think times are tough if they can't get an Internet connection. They're right; times are tough, but there was a time before it all began to go to shit, when it all really was shit. Our generation was born into that time. It was called World War II.

Trials are a part of life, but there is value in sometimes experiencing adversity which will test (and so strengthen) our faith and also build an understanding of God and ourselves.

Beaten paths are for beaten men.

Ah, war – machine wars. Bullets took them all. The brave and the cowardly, the weak and the fine strong ones like Dannie. And it wasn't the dying that took bravery, then, for cowards could die. It was the living that took bravery – living in that mud and rain and cold and keeping the spirit strong through it all. That was the bravery.

He pried your fingers loose from any rock of comfort you clung to in the treacherous waters of human life and laughed if you drowned. Instead of a beatific smile, Roshi offered a sarcastic smirk.

I never felt cool growing up. I was a bit of an outsider, but I discovered theatre very early on, which got me through.

Simply suffering—that is what will be needed then—not parries, blows or thrusts such as may still be possible or admissible in the preliminary fight; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully. . . . [F]or sometime [the church struggle] hasn't even been about what it appears to be about; the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: "Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

We will have to move through a very deep valley, I believe much deeper than we can sense now, before we will be able to ascend the other side again. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

All right," he wrote, "if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ."21

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. Nobody in the startup world could have such a mug, I mused; it would be ridiculous. My experience is full of situations where reality proved too unpredictable to avoid failure.

I particularly remember a moment from back then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail.

As I can attest, anybody who fails in a startup can claim that he or she has learned a lot from the experience. They can tell a compelling story.

Every setback is an opportunity for learning.

We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall.

we all know stories of epic entrepreneurs who managed to pull out a victory when things seemed incredibly bleak. unfortunately,we don't hear stories about the countless nameless others who persevered too long, leading their companies to failure.

Eric S. Brown

Growing up, birthdays weren't the best of times.

4 of us, and 2,000 of them. Piss-poor odds. For them.

We are all victims of our lives. Some of us accept our circumstances better than others. Some rot from the inside out until every word they speak drips with sourness or venom. I suppose that

Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, or an hour or a day, or even a year. But eventually, it will subside. And something else take its place. If I quit, however, it will last forever.