Quotes About Adversity

Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can't have done much for their spirits either.

In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.

I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.

Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619–1621 were dead by the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.

don't become paralyzed, and they do indeed sometimes

I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling.

Clayton had a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers.

Mourn your losses later, after the fight's over, Sergeant Melton used to say. When you're in the fight, fight.

She said swearing shows a lack of creativity. I'm not so sure. When things get really tough, I can get pretty creative with my cussing.

The real people are still there, with their problems and potential, hopes and dreams. It's just hard for them to make good decisions when their brains are filled, and their spirits broken, with so much

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can fi nd humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Failure is not the opposite of success. It's a stepping stone to success.

It requires courage and resolve to resist the constant pressures and expectations confronting you and to take corrective action when necessary.

Courageous people are ordinary people like you and me who began at some point to face their fears rather than run from them. When

Armed with humility, we who once dreaded change as much as death can learn to face real life with a new courage and hope.

only to reminisce about his high school career, which included a failed stint at quarterback. Finally, Parcells said, "We're going to come

So MJ, Kobe, Iverson,62 T-Mac and Wade made the leap from twenty-three to twenty-four, but Thompson took a step backward. Why? Two words: nose candy.

fact, the '01 Lakers swept a 50-win Blazers team (that nearly beat them the previous spring), a 55-win Kings team (that almost beat them 12 months later), and a 58-win Spurs team (that won three titles in the next six years),43 then came within an overtime loss of sweeping the 56-win Sixers

We can win. We can lose. We can fall down. We can get up and do it over again, better. We can go for it as if we have nothing to lose, knowing we have everything to lose. ... We can tear up a dance floor and put it all back together again. We can talk loud in public. We can be fierce. We can be small. We can be mighty. We can be too much. We can be just enough, just in time. We can. We have to.

That's one of the remarkable things about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse.

Calvin : There's no problem so awful, that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse.

Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words.

CALVIN: As usual goodness hardly puts up a fight.

Some days you get up and you already know that things aren't going to go well. They're the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging. Of course, they never let you do that.