Quotes About Adversity

Let me alone: I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it's off the better.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

I tell everybody that you haven't lived a good life if you haven't made a mistake.

I think the personal stories that I tell in my life, I think, sort of do add up to say that you can fail and fail and fail again and continue to move forward.

There's always gonna be setbacks; there's always gonna be knockdowns. There's always gonna be people telling you, 'Hey, you suck!'

I was on my face. I heard the count from one to 10. I kept telling myself that I had to get up, but I couldn't move. I couldn't make myself move. It was the strangest feeling.

There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.

My parents broke up when I was six. Before, I was a very active, naughty child, but after my father left me, I stopped talking. I became very good at hiding my emotions. I felt so ashamed of telling others that I didn't have a father, because that was not common in the 1960s.

Telling people that I wanted to make dance music, or be on the radio, they looked at me like I was crazy because there was nothing like that in Lichtenstein when I was getting started. That's why I went to Germany, because there is industry there.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

I was aware, however, that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career.

I hate telling that story to people who've been struggling for years.

It's like all the signs were telling me that I shouldn't be a boxer, so I quit.

If someone taps me on the shoulder and tells me they don't want me to open the batting for England, it's going to hurt.

You can't even imagine the feeling you get when someone tells you that you are about to lose your legs.

When somebody tells you they don't think you're good enough here, your face doesn't fit, you don't just roll over; you've got to back yourself.

I'm a survivor, at least that's what everyone tells me.

No one ever tells a story to help you figure out where to go when a door closes on you.

No one tells you what to do if you completely flop at the beginning of a performance.

If you will do what God tells you to do, there's no person on Earth and no devil in Hell that can keep you from having what God wants you to have.

Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid taking unalterable action while at a low point in life. I have never been conventional.

You graduate from film school and move to Hollywood. Hollywood tells you, 'We're not the place for you to make films,' so you decide you have to make a film yourself.