Quotes About Adversity

I've been through hell and just barely got scorched.

Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls. Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle, sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing, sweetening of the fibres of character,—but she always pays.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

The truest and deepest pathos in this world is not that of suffering but that of brave struggling.

Were there no devil, yet we should have our hands full, in resisting the corruptions of our own hearts; but

Few are made better by prosperity, whom afflictions make worse.

To pray always may import as much as to pray in all conditions; that is, in prosperity as well as in adversity. So Calvin takes it: omni tempore perinde valet, atque tam prosperis quâm adversis—it holds at all times equally, and as much in prosperity as in adversity.

And here is all the devil gets; instead of destroying his faith which he aims at, he is the occasion of the refining of it, and thereby adding to its strength.

And I pray, what is our life in this world but a dark night of temptation?

If all the devil's wits and wiles will not serve him to overcome one single soldier in Christ's camp, much less shall he ever ruin the whole army. These

Such is the weak constitution of grace, that it can neither well bear smiles or frowns from God without a snare; as one said of our English nation,[2] it cannot well bear liberty nor bondage in the height. So neither can the soul.

Fear not what you can suffer, only be careful for what you {do} suffer.

By 'praying always,' saith he, he exhorts us to pray in prosperity as well as adversity; and not then to intermit the practice of this duty because not driven to it by such outward pres sing necessities.

Every sin thou committest is a new line that the devil draws on thy soul.

Of this psalm Luther would say, in times of great confusion in the church, 'Let us sing the six and fortieth psalm, in spite of the devil and all his instruments.

Dum mala pungunt, bona promissa un guunt—while calamities smite with oppression, the gracious promises anoint with their blessings.

A friend for adversity is as proper as fire is for a winter's day.

We have scarcely gotten home ... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so. There is the bellyache and the burned-out basement bulb, the stalled car and the incontinent cat. The windows frost, the toilets sweat, the body of our spouse is one cold shoulder and the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.

The line of least resistance makes crooked rivers and crooked men. Each fish that battles upstream is worth ten that loaf in lazy bays.

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater.

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.

Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn, and laughter.

A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil.