Quotes About Adversity

Factions within the client's senior management prevented us from doing our job. Data we asked for arrived late, or in an unusable form or not at all. People we needed to interview refused to speak with us. The members of the client team vigorously pursued their own agendas at the expense of reaching a solution. We spent several uncomfortable months on this study and, in the end, had to make what recommendations we could, "declare victory," and get out.

Ignorance, foolishness, and poverty-we owned this by our birth.

In adversity people regain all the virtues which they lose in prosperity (30 January 1855)

Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.

When besieged, I'm calm as a baby. When all hell breaks loose, I'm collected and cool.

It's the set of the sail, and not the gale that determines the way they go.

The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God's purposes in us.

Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest. The person of faith is not a person who has been born, luckily, with a good digestion and sunny disposition

audacious quip of Teresa of Avila when she was energetically engaged in reforming the Carmelite monasteries, traveling all over Spain by oxcart on bad roads. One day she was thrown from her cart into a muddy stream. She shook her fist at God, "God, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you don't have many.

Don't curse God; and don't damn your leaders.

There were years of wilderness guerrilla warfare against the Philistines, a perilous existence with moody, manic King Saul, and all that painful groping and praying through the guilt of murder and adultery; then in his old age he was chased from his throne by his own son and forced to set up a government in exile. And, at the end, his song. It begins with gratitude:

This joy is not dependent on our good luck in escaping hardship. It is not dependent on our good health and avoidance of pain. Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune.

Not a day goes by but what we have to deal with that ancient triple threat that Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh and the devil:

The plows of persecution aren't working, and the oxherds haven't even noticed! They plod back and forth, unaware that their opposition is worthless.

To be human is to be in trouble.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

We's all poor nuts and things happen, and we yust get mixed in wrong, that's all.

I understood better the range of human capability; it was far broader than I'd thought. In my previous life, I'd dealt mostly with people at the top of their game. Now I was dealing with people whose capabilities had been diminished. By disease, doubt, fatigue.

as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." What

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.

Circumstances rule men and not men rule circumstances.

This is courage in a man to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

You were a stranger to sorrow: therefore Fate has cursed you.