Quotes About Adversity

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

Don't take criticism personally; take from it what's useful. Apply it and move on to something better.

All lessons are useful.

There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested. Whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unexpected strengths.

Depression is so smart - it uses all your references and patterns.

The Adversity Index was created by msnbc.com and Moody's Analytics to track the economic fortunes of states and metro areas. Each month, the Adversity Index uses government data on employment, industrial production, housing starts and home prices to label each area as expanding, at risk of recession, in recession or recovering.

The one thing that makes me laugh about the phrase 'the worst week of my life' is that nobody actually uses that phrase when something really bad happens.

The problem is not getting rid of fear, but using it properly.

I feel that I fell somewhat under that category where I was using fighting to kind of run from my own self to an extent, to kind of numb the things that I thought about myself. When I had fighting taken away, I was forced to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'What are you without fighting?'

I've been saying it all along: please do not demonise Robert Mugabe. I'm not saying the methods he's using are correct, but he was put under great pressure.

When you start with next to nothing, all you've got is a lot of thought, a lot of innovation, figuring new ways to do things without using a lot of money.

When your name is Twinkle, you are a bookworm, and a fat child, then you have to be ready to be made fun of. As a child, I used my fists a lot, but then the tongue seemed like a better option. So I started using words as a sword to jab fun at myself.

I burned out my drawing hand by using it too much. The common word for it is writer's cramp. The fancy words for it are focal dystonia. The symptom in my case was a pinky finger that went spastic when I tried to draw.

I'm not someone who has had to deal with much personal drama outside of the usual: growing up with parents who hated each other, two marriages and divorces of my own. There was the cancer thing, too.

I'd say 'Codename Baboushka' has been a slightly more difficult process for me, but I think that's precisely because it's quite different to my usual fare. And even then, being difficult doesn't make me prefer it, or not, to anything else. I like a challenge.

You have years where most things go your way, and you have years where more things than usual seem like a challenge.

Chemo is properly punishing, and it's hard to do things at the usual level.

Lara always tells people that he beat me in the amateurs. I lost to him in international competition when I was just 17 years old. In that fight, he ran around as usual. I thought I had really won that fight.

In December of 1990, just before my eighth birthday, I left China for the United States. My father was a political dissident, and after he was released from prison, we joined my mother in a little town in the mountains of Utah. It was quite a change from my hometown of Shanghai, a city of 25 million people.

I've never been the top dog. I've always been the underdog. And that's why I relate so much to Utah, because we're underdogs, we're overlooked, kind of thought of as an afterthought.

Because, you know, you're in Utah. And because of its political conservatism, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

When you play against top players, sometimes you can play - you can play your utmost and you still get beat.

Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Indestructible does not mean utterly invincible.