Quotes About Adversity

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their footsteps.

He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because he was free.

There are two stages - living on little, and living on nothing. They are like two rooms, the first dark, the second pitch-black.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.

People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

to arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. He had undergone everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. Rather than borrow, he did not eat.

It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by becoming bearable.

three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved;

Injustice had made her sulle, and misery had made her ugly.

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From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war; and that in this war he was the conquered.

For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.For a person's nature,like a rock,can be drilled into by drops of water.

To be nothing where he had been everything was an unendurable decline.

The galleys make the convict what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.

He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity.

She flourishes and grows green amid ruins; she has ivy for the stones and love for man.

Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars.

A clock does not stop at the very moment you lose the key.

Errors make excellent projectiles.

He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

Great perils have this fine characteristic, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.