Quotes About Adversity

The hand issue I had throughout the India tour, and which eventually led to surgery, no doubt took people by surprise.

Someone said adversity builds character, but someone else said adversity reveals character. I'm pleasantly surprised with my resilience. I persevere, and not just blindly. I take the best, get rid of the rest, and move on, realizing that you can make a choice to take the good.

I could have easily never worked again after 'Precious.' I could be back at my receptionist job and no one would be surprised, but I'm having a very crazy little career that no one thought would happen. Although that was never the plan.

I surprise myself that I'm not dead in the gutter somewhere, surprised that I haven't given up.

Sometimes it used to hurt so bad when people used to say stuff about me. It still does. But I'm at a level now that I'm like, 'I ain't surprised that they said this or that about me.'

Life is full of challenges and surprises, and I've had my share.

Filming 'The Road to Riches' was surprisingly difficult for me. I learned that going back to career successes and failures can be emotionally exhausting as you are forced to revisit the euphoric highs and painful lows in high speed.

What are you going to do? Admit to yourself that the pitchers have you on the point of surrender? You can't do that. You must make yourself think that the pitchers are just as good as they always have been or just as bad.

People are impatient. They want things to happen overnight, and have no idea of the circumstances and situations that can surround an individual at times.

There is no apprenticeship to misfortune. When it strikes us, we still have everything to learn.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody's eye.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.

Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram.

That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep.

Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.

down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero

And most men can stand what they've got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye. Like they're doing all over the world right now.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little wile I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising

when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

So they didn't scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?