Quotes About Adversity

Our major finding is that your history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity (see Figure 8). This is similar to the findings of other researchers looking at the power of positive relationships on health. Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.

Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity as well.

The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That's an average of one every twelve to eighteen months.

You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don't learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless.

First, creativity thrives on isolation and disconnection. Studies of creativity for two decades have found a consistent pattern: Those facing adversity often suffer from social exclusion, a sense of being ostracized from society, and a feeling of being out of sync or out of touch with those around them. These attitudes, in turn, give these individuals more freedom to take risks, to experiment, to explore means of expression outside the social mainstream.

From shame to sadness to fear, from overcoming your resistance to embracing the brutal facts of your situation, the first tool of transitions is to identify the circumstances you're in and accept the emotions that come with this new state. The next tool may seem even harder to master, yet it's the one approach people seem to crave more than any other.

Lifequakes may be voluntary or involuntary, but navigating the transitions that flow from them can only be voluntary. We must choose to deploy the skills.

All in, I concluded that the total number of disruptors the average adult faces is between thirty and forty.

Oh boo-hoo, pussy boy.

every man is an island and at the same time also robinson crusoe.

is intended to break the spirit, to render harmless those who are thought to be harmful.

While being beaten by the other kids encouraged me to learn a new language, it wasn't doing my confidence a lot of good.

It's queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.

The factories, the jails, the drunken days and nights, the hospitals have weakened and shaken me like a mouse in the mouth of a hip-cat: life. - from an Aug. 1965 letter to Jim Roman On Cats

No sabían cómo recuperarse. Venían de un barrio rico, no sabían lo que significaba luchar por recuperarse.

Henry: That's it. Wanda: That's what? Henry: I'm broke. Can't buy another drink. Wanda: You mean you don't have any money? Henry: No money, no job, no rent. Hey, I'm back to normal.

I want to remind you right quick what this country has been through, and the challenges this economy had faced over the last three years. First, we went through a recession. That means we were going backwards.

Everything happens for me, not to me.

All thinking things fear. Sentience, perhaps, is facing that fear and conquering it rather than succumbing. A tiger will drown in a tar pit, but a man who can clear his thoughts may survive.

I lay on my back, whimpering at the dark sky, and tried to remember when I'd last gotten my ass kicked this thoroughly. Less than a week ago, probably, because it had been a bad couple of weeks, but

Nowadays they hate for nothin'. You ain't even gotta have nothin'. They hatin' on homeless people and shit. Like, "How he get him another plate? Aw man, hell naw. Fuck that homeless nigga." 2Pac told you muhfuckas will hate you for whatever you do, good or bad. No matter what. So you might as well get used to it.

For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.

Às vezes, as coisas aconteciam a despeito dos seus melhores esforços. E não havia muito a fazer.

Just when we think we have our own stories figured out, heroes arise in the most unexpected places.