Quotes About Adversity

I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this;— who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I

I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney.

is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

What a different aspect will courage put upon the face of things!

a proof that good books, no more than good men, do always survive the bad.

Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair.

No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. 

I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain - it can't spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

If she had troubles she must keep them to herself, and if life was difficult it would not make it easier to confess herself beaten.

I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like.

She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone.

When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.

Even iron sometimes melts.

There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering.

I'm a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck . . . everyone else has gone . . . I'm all that's left.

Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.

It's very easy to laugh at her but it is not easy to be as brave as she.