Quotes About Adversity

El humor es otra de las armas del alma en su lucha por la supervivencia.

In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms"—the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.

El hombre que se levanta es aún más fuerte que el que no ha caído

Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insuffcient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them.

In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances

He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest – and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will

A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction.

Cualquier hombre, a lo largo de su vida, se verá enfrentado a su destino y tendrá la oportunidad de convertir un puro estado de sufrimiento en una hazaña interior.

A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that.

Suffering in and of itself is meaningless, we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And

There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.

Los supervivientes de los campos aún recordamos a los hombres que iban a los barracones a consolar a los demás, ofreciéndoles su único mendrugo de pan. Quizá no fueron muchos, pero esos pocos son una muestra irrefutable de que al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo, salvo una cosa: la libertad humana —la libre elección de la acción personal ante las circunstancias— para elegir el propio camino.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.

And I quoted from Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker. (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)

When, on his return, a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had.

No nos entraba en la cabeza que nos lo quitarían todo, absolutamente todo.

al hombre se le puede arrebatar todo, salvo una cosa: la libertad humana —la libre elección de la acción personal ante las circunstancias