Quotes About Adversity

Mens fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.

When somebody's too smooth like he is, then somebody else is going to get the rough of it I always say.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

I've always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune.

I was all too aware that there's an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due tot he cold, and I believed myself.

The summer is cruel to its leaves, the fall to its colors, the winter to us.

Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.

Fate stalks us with depressing monotony from womb to tomb, and, when we are least expecting it, deals us a series of crushing blows from behind.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

Do you know you can learn from pain?' But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:

You can't get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not… sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn't submerge you.

You . . . person," he says; and again, "you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.

When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it--oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same." He pours himself some of the duke's present. "But in the last resort, you just kick it in.

We don't have to invite pain in, he thinks. It's waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is". - Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.

It's all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you're an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don't you take a holiday?

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

Never mind." He thinks, "tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.