Quotes About Adversity

When you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it's not.

Bad news has good legs.

You will only learn in a fight how much you've got to learn.

to Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis in the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell. "And the protective impact of nearby nature is strongest for the most vulnerable children—those experiencing the highest levels of stressful life events.

Children with more nature near their homes also rated themselves higher than their corresponding peers on a global measure of self-worth. "Even in a rural setting with a relative abundance of green landscape, more [nature] appears to be better when it comes to bolstering children's resilience against stress or adversity

A troubled life beats having no life at all

My advice to myself is simple. Run with MS, not away from it. That race from existing illness cannot be won. See the truth. We move forward with grace when the wind is at our backs.

Not many men ever saw Washington disturbed by bad news; it was much more likely to have the opposite effect on him, acting like a goad that brought out the best in his character, stiffening his resolve to win against odds that would have defeated a less resolute man before he began.

The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some isappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.

bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.

I don't think any of us are prepared for the bitter pill we're sometimes asked to swallow.

Ordinarily I believe that I have as high a spirit as the average man, and as solid a resolution; but when one has been dragged through the Valley of Humiliation, and plunged, again and again, into the Waters of Bitterness and Privation, a man can be constrained to a course of action of which, in his happier moments, he would have deemed himself incapable. I know this of my own knowledge.

We are all of us blue babies. At critical seconds, we all lack necessary air.

The stunted pines elude capture in a thousand sidetracked increments. The wind will never understand them. Like us it is forced to go on.

Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

There is a time to be timid. There is a time to be conciliatory. There is a time, even, to fly and there is a time to fight. And I'm going to fight like hell. (On Congressional moves toward impeachment)

We are all in it together. This is a war. We take a few shots and it will be over. We will give them a few shots and it will be over.

Even our best qualities can turn against us, and when they do we are usually the last to know.

True greatness comes not when things go always good for you; but true greatness comes when you are really tested, when you have taken some knocks, faced some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be atop the highest mountain.

when all else fails, he thought, make an offering to the god of laughter.

It is often during the worst of times that we see the best of humanity–awakening within the most ordinary of us that which is most sublime. I do not believe that it is circumstance that produces such greatness any more than it is the canvas that makes the artist. Adversity merely presents the surface on which we render our souls' most exacting likeness. It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.