Quotes About Adversity

It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: "Just when you think you've got it figured out, you don't.

Why would anyone entertain Satan's questions about God's goodness when everything is good? But a few bumps in the road, and our knowledge of God seems fragile, and that's what Satan is counting on.

But stinging nettles: They just love existing, don't they? They're bastards. Stinging nettles are the Nazis of the weed world.

You stick a wooden stake through the heart of your failures and they become successes.

Fear is a relative term and so I can only measure my feelings at that time by what I had experienced in previous positions of danger and by those that I have passed through since; but I can say without shame that if the sensations I endured during the next few minutes were fear, then may God help the coward, for cowardice is of a surety its own punishment.

I should at least die as I had lived—fighting.

To me there always seems a way to gain the opposite side of an obstacle. If one cannot pass over it, or below it, or around it, why then there is but a single alternative left, and that is to pass through it.

I had had to discard my rifle

To face that savage mountain of onrushing ferocity, to stand unshaken before the hideous fangs that he knew were bared in slavering blood-thirstiness, though he could not see them, required nerves of steel; but of such were the nerves of Carthoris of Helium.

To me there always seems a way to gain the opposite side of an obstacle. If one cannot pass over it, or below it, or around it, why then there is but a single alternative left, and that is to pass through it. I could

Leave to a Thark his head and one hand and he may yet conquer.

I should prefer being thrown to the demnition ducks and drakes, he said moodily.

Tragedy cannot take place around a type. Suffering is the most individualizing thing on earth.

If you cannot imagine pain fully, neither can you fully imagine the resources you have in you to meet it and overcome it.

It is odd, the twists that life will sometimes take. The ewe that you think will give birth with ease dies bringing forth a two-headed lamb. Or the ski trail that you have been told is treacherous, you navigate easily.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart

but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.

Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....

She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.

It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.