Quotes About Adversity

We can spend our days bemoaning our losses, or we can grow from them. Ultimately the choice is ours. We can be victims of circumstance or masters of our own fate, but make no mistake, we cannot be both. The Walk - Epilogue Page 288

Only those who never step, never stumble.

Roses can grow in slums just as weeds can grow around mansions.

Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, people give up hope that they can expect anything more from life, when the real quest is finding out what life expects from them.

People talk of life's storms as if they are universal experiences. But they're not. Some people hear thunder while others touch lightning.

The first casualty of hitting rock bottom is vanity.

I have wondered why it is that our greatest triumphs spring from our greatest extremity and adversity. Perhaps it is because we are so resistant to change, we only move when our seat becomes too hot to occupy.

Sometimes life is like that...Things that seem bad at the time are really blessings.

It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.

I am facing the most difficult thing of my life, my own greatest failure.

They are like pythons in the jungle. The smallest child can crush a python egg. But let the snake hatch and grow and the python with squeeze and devour the child.

It's easy to hate the game when your losing.

For the third time since I began, my walk has been delayed. In the beginning, I had considered these stops on my journey as interruptions---but I'm coming to understand that perhaps these detours are my journey. No matter how much I, or the rest of humanity wishes otherwise, life is not lived in smooth, downhill expressways, but in the obscure, perilous trails and rocky back roads of life where we stumble and feel our way through the fog of the unknown.

The sun will rise again. The only uncertainty is whether or not we will rise to greet it. Alan Christensen's diary

There is one day that has brought me unspeakable pain, & the effects of that day continue to cover & erode my world like rust. I suspect that someday the rust will eat through the joists & posts of my life & I will topple, literally as well as figuratively.

when faced with overwhelming loss and stress, a man must choose to live and find his own way through his broken heart.

That which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger," Mike said. "Except bears. Bears will kill you.

We climb mountains because the valleys are full of cemeteries. The secret of survival is to climb, even in the dark, even when the climb seems pointless. The climb, not the summit, is the thing. And the great don't just climb mountains, they carve them as they go. Korczak

Like all living things, love, too, struggles against hardship, and in the process sheds its fatuous skin to expose one composed of more than just a storm of emotion-one of loyalty and divine friendship. And though it may be temporarily blinded by adversity, it never gives in or up, holding tight to lofty ideals that transcend this earth and time- while its counterfeit simply concludes it was mistaken and quickly runs off to find the next real thing.

Hard things don't always make life harder. It takes something hard to sharpen steel.

There's no problem so big that whining won't make it worse.

They tried to bury us. They just didn't know we were seeds.

People talk of life's storms as if they are universal experiences. But they're not. Some people hear thunder while others touch lightning.

Sometimes the most whole people are those who come from the most broken circumstances.