Quotes About Adversity

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual.

When you are tightly boxed in or cornered—all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions—all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.

Not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.

one bird, usually the largest, will eventually win—but even the victor may be hurt by the fight. That means a third bird, an undamaged, canny bystander, can move in, opportunistically, and defeat the now-crippled victor. That is not at all a good deal for the first two birds

Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.

LIFE IS SUFFERING. THAT'S CLEAR. There is no more basic, irrefutable truth.

But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many

The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable.

The world is set hard against us, of a certainty, but man's inhumanity to man is something even worse.

People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

And I have learned through painful experience that nothing is going so badly that it can't be made worse.

It was all those counterproductive forces that the Egyptians were attempting to conceptualize in the figure of Set, the enemy of illumination, enlightenment, vision, and consciousness.

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.

We'll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well.

Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destruction.

El futuro trae consigo lo desconocido; por tanto, la inflexibilidad y la falta de voluntad para cambiar traen la certeza de la extinción.

Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer—we're tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world.

No i nakon iskustva zla mogu?e je nau?iti se dobru.

Slay the dragon in his lair before he comes to your village. If you run from the things you are afraid of, you run from what you need, in fact, to find.

In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.

Even if I was "traumatized," what would be the point of having survived it only to have to pay someone else to complain to about it, rather than turn it into something positive?

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. Knowing this, tie a rope to a boulder