Quotes About Adversity

circumstances—not necessarily in holiness and radiant light, but often in confusion among people with deep problems.

during tough times, "Leaders stretch to the challenge, while followers shrink from the challenge.

The thought does cross my mind that I could slip and end up cracking my head on the pavement just short of the pool, but if you're always going to worry about minor drawbacks, then you'll never accomplish anything.

The real world is coming, chugging straight at me like a bulldozer into the rain forest.

It's too big to change. It's too heavy and all sharp-cornered and shit.

She thought little of her ordeal. Cruelty was part of nature, like a winter frost; something to be survived and then forgotten (p.689)

Shoulder to shoulder they stood in a circle of woe, and woe was all their assailants found to greet them.

Being laughed at is excellent preparation for marriage.

Unexpected situations are often matched by unexpected virtues, are they not?

Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."24

Real courage is knowing what faces you and knowing how to face it.

Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress.

In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.

An apple that hasn't experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that's hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to bring out the acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth.

to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Ike Osteen's life spans the flu epidemic of 1918, the worst depression in American history, and a world war that ripped apart the globe. Nothing compares to the black dusters of the 1930s, he says, a time when the simplest thing in life—taking a breath—was a threat. Up

A handful of Hoosiers were heroic—two rabbis, an African American publisher born enslaved, a fearless Catholic lawyer, a small-town editor repeatedly beaten and thrown in jail, a lone prosecutor.

ground. In 1917, about forty-five

Never let a good crisis go to waste. It's the universe challenging you to learn something new and rise to the next level of your potential.

Learn to be difficult when it counts

Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.

You're not responsible for the hand of cards you were dealt. You're responsible for maxing out what you were given.

Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

Fighting emotions is like flailing in quicksand—it only makes things worse. Sometimes, the most proactive "defense" is a mental nod and wink.