Quotes About Adversity

On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation

a stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.

To hell with it, he thought. Bad start is a good ending, boys.

That wasn't a mistake, was 'a fully justified venture which, for reasons beyond your control, did not work

In this hard struggle I had little refreshment but from the fountains of my own soul. Had I not clung to myself, the atrocity of others had made me a demon.

A New Yorker can never be beat, Gorham, because he gets right back up again. Remember that.

Qué representa esa rueda? —preguntó Pentecost. —Es la rueda de la fortuna, señor —contestó el padre. —¿Y qué significa eso, buen hombre? —Pues que aunque un hombre alcance fama y fortuna, puede volver a caer en la miseria. O al revés. Significa que la vida es como una rueda, señor, que no cesa de girar. Y nos enseña que debemos ser humildes, señor. Pues aunque lleguemos muy alto, podemos caer muy bajo.

Every paradise demands a serpent.

It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump.

You don't really know who you are until you have gone through suffering.

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us" (Danticat 19).

Still, she heard herself say, "Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. 'Nou led, nou la,' it says. 'We are ugly, but we are here.' Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all odds, we exist.

Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.

he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms.

Sometimes you just have to shake the devil off you, whatever that devil is. Even if you don't feel like living for yourself, you have to start living for your child, for your children

Sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the "territory" is a family or an organization

The degree of pain we are experiencing at any time almost always includes two variables: the stimulus "causing" the discomfort, and the threshold for tolerance—that is, the capacity to overcome or perhaps reduce the sensation itself.

All could see the holly now bristling green. From every cut and wound and point from which a parted limb had gone, a hundred prickly, scorning tongues.

But no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on, nor contributed significantly to the evolution of our species by working a forty-hour week, nor achieved any significant accomplishment by taking refuge in cynicism.

There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!

If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month. But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.