Quotes About Adversity

Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it's what we do with it that defines our lives.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

La foudre abat les monts, non les petites herbes

At 18, I could have not been here. I could have been another statistic. All the odds were in favour of my just going to prison at that age. I had no visions of being a superstar.

My guitar survived Kosovo, then I went to visit a record company back in London and fell off my motorbike with it on my back, smashing it to bits. I was travelling at two miles per hour.

I knew kids whose first car was one of those exclusive Range Rovers, where only two of that model would be made in the world. I would visit my friends' houses, and they'd be as big as this whole gym. And then I'd go home, and me and Justin would be sleeping together. On a pull-out couch.

I submitted videos and applications to talent agencies and TV shows; I drove to Vegas and visited agents. I was on 'America's Got Talent'; I played for free at venues in attempts to be 'found' and yet all the experts in the entertainment industry told me that what I did was not marketable and that I had to join a group or do more traditional music.

I go back to family: 'Ice Age' was about disparate characters rejected by their own kind. They come together to save the child. 'Despicable Me' is about redefining what a family could be. It has a visual distinction and an experimental quality.

Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

I would think about the outcome. Visualize sometimes. Because it never comes out the way you want it to. Fight the way I know how to fight. Whatever comes up, comes up.

Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur.

I remember very vividly going to school, being very happy, and then just having guys there who were just out to make my life miserable.

When I say dirt-poor, I mean Mom made maybe $25,000 a year. I remember buying milk with food stamps. Vividly. So, growing up, I was the minority.

I don't sing now, because I had polio when I was 15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was lucky that it didn't affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasn't able to sing. And they said I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did.

I never had vocal lessons, dance classes, or any of the things my peers had.

People would ask, 'Why is your vocal cord paralyzed?' I said it was a virus. I didn't say it was an elective procedure to add hair to the front of my head. It was embarrassing. There's an embarrassing element to that.

I was born with a cyst on my vocal cords.

The only thing I could do was play music, because I'd studied classical guitar, trumpet and piano at the American School in Alexandria. So I started out with two other boys in little clubs in Athens. I became a singer by default when our lead vocalist was late one night. Someone had to sing.

I think my father would have become a millionaire if he had grown up in South Korea or the United States... Almost anywhere else, business would have been my father's vocation. But in North Korea, it was simply a means to survive.

A few girls would be catty and say that my voice sounded really high, and I sang like a chipmunk, I got a few prank calls about that a few times. But it didn't really bother me that much. I think I was so focused on music that nothing could break me or get in my way.

Nothing can affect my voice, it's so bad.

My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap. I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute.

I had a galvanised voice: I could sing through a 105 fever or a flu or a root canal or anything that you could throw at me.