Quotes About Adversity

Look, this is going to be a very hard challenge. I want you to think about how demanding this is going to be. If you don't think you're going to like it, that's fine. Nobody's going to hate you.

When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you."25

There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.

she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare. [A Red Cross worker during WWII in Italy]

If you smile when you lose, then you win in life.

I can't use hope against swords.

It's a hard life for a woman, Felicity," he had said before. And she had said, "Any life is hard for a woman.

You can find friends in manure, sometimes, my son.

Oh, yes. Every year in this Land of the Gods we have earth tremors. And fires and flood and Great Waves, and the monster storms – the tai-funs. Nature is very strong with us.' Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. 'Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage.

What is pain to a man? A privilege!

What is pain to a man? A privilege! Masking pain is the measure of a man.

I've set myself against the sea all my life and I've always won. I always will.

After all those horrors at Changi, you don't detest them?" After a pause Peter Marlowe shook his head. "I don't detest anyone. Even Grey. It takes all of my mind and energy to appreciate that I'm alive.

I'd say we're in the sewer, up to our chins, and the tide's coming in fast.

Get your wits about you and take the juice out of every day, however bad

No man knows courage," his father had told him, "who has not known fear.

In an unpublished 1945 dispatch sent shortly before he was killed by machine-gun fire on Okinawa, Ernie Pyle evoked the precarious seaworthiness of the tiny vessels: "They are rough and tumble little ships. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, under water half the time. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both.

As Marine Corps aviator Samuel Hynes would observe, "They go to war because it's impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.

This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.

Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.

Fear and I played peek-a-boo - it always seemed to grab my balls and twist just when it felt like something inside me could banish all the bullshit forever.

Claire De Haven and the company cared for the plight of the world. Claire De Haven and the company extolled tyrants and lived for adversarial cliché.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.