Quotes About Adversity

There were many times that I took such a big hit that I was dazed; I'm not going to lie. I'd see black, but I'm still looking for the puck. Where's the play going? I'm going to keep going. Same thing in figure skating. If I take a hard fall, I'm going to get up, and I'm going to do the next jump.

In part because of my own journey from a council estate in East London to a seat in the House of Commons, and in part because my adolescence took place during an economic boom and the advent of new technology, I had assumed that over time we would all become better off and, as the white wristbands told us, we would 'Make Poverty History.'

What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What's left for them to take?

You got people that come in, one album, two albums, and they're gone. A lot of people couldn't take the break I took and come back into the game, and people be checking for them.

They took my 30s, my 40s, my 50s, but what they couldn't take was my joy. I couldn't do nothing about the years, but I could control my joy... I kept a smile on my face; I kept love in my heart.

For me, trying the NFL and trying this football thing, because of the home and what I went through in there, to me, it was no big deal. It was just another opportunity for me. I didn't see that bigger, grandiose picture of it, I just took it one day at a time, like how I took it in the group home.

It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

I learned more of how to appreciate what I had then - my family, my kids, the talent that God gives you - because He can take it away at any time. He took it away from Brian through death. He took it away from me through my knees.

I've used my sense of humor as a coping tool. It's gotten me through a lot of challenging times.

Sports provides that tool kit to be successful in life. Because it's not always going to be smooth sailing.

Infinite power just isn't very interesting, no matter what game you're playing. It's much more fun when you have a limited tool set to use against the odds.

I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, and I wasn't the biggest, so I got real good at running my mouth and making people laugh and using humor as a way to not get into fights.

The whole thing about Tool is that it kind of feeds on itself. If it's going, it's going. If it's at a grinding halt, there's either the will to pick it up again and get it going or not. We've been through serious stages of nothing... business problems or personal problems or whatever.

I've got all the tools to make it hard for anyone, especially someone that's a division lower than me.

I live a very different life now, with incredible privileges, but looking back I realise that growing up in Russia gave me tools that other people don't necessarily have - such as the will to push that bit further, to make things happen, to succeed.

Any child actor will tell you that you don't have a lot of the tools or the experience to combat a lot of the criticism or very adult situations being thrown at you.

Some people just don't have the tools to deal with the stuff life throws at them.

I think my career has been instances of me trying to figure out ways to get around doing it the right way because I don't think I have the tools to do it the right way. There's a talent to that.

Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize - and sometimes you have to cauterize - the ones who really are against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, they'll fight you tooth and nail.

I lost my front tooth in rugby league when a fat guy from Bellevue Hill kicked me in the face as I got up from a tackle to mark him. I made this decision not to cap the tooth because I thought it was false. But I didn't make any movies as a teenager, and I had a very hard time with girls and stuff.

I got a tooth bust by somebody who decided they didn't like me and I thought the moustache hid a scar on my lip. It's true that people were told facial hair was not appreciated by the British public, but I just decided to keep the moustache.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.

If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.

When you come back on top after you've fallen, it's a better story.