Quotes About Adversity

History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless.

Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.

Time perfects men as well as destroys them.

It is easy to stand a pain, but difficult to stand an itch.

whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.

The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.

I was not good in school. I could never read very fast or very well. I got tested for learning disabilities, for dyslexia. Then I got put on Ritalin and Dexedrine. I took those starting in the eighth grade. As soon as they pumped that drug into me, it would focus me right in.

Of course you can go on. It's what we do. We go on. Learn how to live with the suffering we're dealt.

Favorite book: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

Sometimes the bitch wins.

If problems fashion the center of our daily existence, we are being formed by these problems. If

When its dark enough you can see the stars.

Anything that takes us out of our comfort zones for a while can act as a reminder that the past we are used to may not be our best future.

On the southern flank, Company B was fast going to pieces. As infiltrating Germans approached Britton's command post in a house, they yelled in English: "Come on out!" To which Britton yelled back: "Fuck you, come on in!"[354]

Oh", he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn't a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.

Against the odds, they refuse to succeed.

Just think how the world would've turned out if Hitler had gotten into art school, thought Lucien.

The winters came early, the rains not often enough, the locusts rose in biblical scale, the land broke hard to the plow, the price for the crops hardly ever enough, the isolation beyond imagination, the long nights forever, and summer sun exploding in their faces and searing their dreams with flames.

The war had made some into libertines and some into serious, sober men.

Whispers was one of these short Italian guys in his early thirties that you'd see all around South Philly, just trying to get by with one hustle or another. This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers. I didn't know the one they blew up; I just heard about it. I

But back then we had to amuse ourselves, and fighting seemed to be all we had. Looking back, it was good for us. You got a lot out of your system. And you learned a lot. And then when our country needed soldiers we were in shape. We already had a mental toughness. I graduated from the eighth grade

In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he'd be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing. Another

Born on St. Valentine's Day in 1913, Jimmy Hoffa was seven years older than Frank Sheeran. Yet both grew to manhood in the same Great Depression, a time when management normally held the upper hand and people struggled just to put food on the table. Jimmy Hoffa's father, a coal miner, died when he was seven. His mother worked in an auto plant to support her children. Jimmy Hoffa quit school at age fourteen to go to work to help his mother. Hoffa

Russell had lost the thumb and index finger on his left hand when he was young. He moved the thumb he still had around like he was grinding something into the white tablecloth and said, "Dust to dust." I