Quotes About Adversity

Reputations were made quickly over the green felt tables ? with the roll of the dice or a turn of a card.

followed – even now at this moment.' The one-time beggar

Call it the courage of an insignificant goat who has survived.

warmed by the cold sea around him.

quoted General William T. Sherman that "every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster." And I concluded with General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's warning that "no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts." We

Robert M. Gates

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask.

If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.

It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Failing better is something every stroke sufferer knows about.

All of us fail, but this doesn't mean we are failures.

when the punishment was sufficient. Even as a boy Boone showed the stoicism

I could see through it, but that didn't make the more difficult thing any less difficult. What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from the cowpen.

Maybe mountaineering shouldn't be considered heroic at all, since the whole effort is 'useless' and in no way to be compared with sitting down at the wrong lunch counter in the early-sixties South, or going into battle. Nevertheless, situations arise in the useless enterprise of mountaineering that present people with choices, that make emotional and physical demands that few can meet.

Ultimately, then, the purpose of every life challenge is the same: to grant us the opportunity to embrace that which we have so far resisted.

The shaming words were solid, immovable events in my life. What do you do with the solid and immovable? You build on it.

I may not have proved a great explorer but we have done the greatest march ever made and come very near to great success. -Robert Scott-