Quotes About Adversity

Good guys don't always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries

Madeleine K. Albright

Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, King, Havel, Mandela, and many other memorable leaders have found in righteous indignation the psychological edge they needed to endure years of doubt and trial. However, such an emotion is not something everyone can control, and it has, when unleashed, enough destructive energy to turn grand potential to failure.

If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn't help a person live.

Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

I also know two steps forward and one step back is the rule, not the exception, as people work on change.

We bear it as best we can,

That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

It was our weakness that drew the war out, not her strength.

Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

Daedalus had said to me once: Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced it as soldiers face their enemies, girded and braced, sword up against the coming blows. Yet all my preparations were not enough.

They will seek to undermine you at every turn.

you can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ~ Odysseus

I let the pebbles tumble to the ground from my fingers, where they lie, haphazard or purposeful, an augury or an accident. If Chiron were here, he could read them, tell us our fortunes. But he is not here. "What if he will not beg?" I ask. "Then he will die. They will all die. I will not fight until he does." His chin juts, bracing for reproach. I am worn out. My arm hurts where I cut it, and my skin feels coated with unwholesome sweat. I do not answer.

Même le meilleur des fers devient cassant à force d'avoir été trop battu.

That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.

1] God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels. 2] But we moderns are impatient and destructive 3] And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious. 4] In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They're disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their head. And you can't reverse the process.

These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids.

A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat—you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable.

The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly.