Quotes About Adversity

Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins—until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before.

What about fateful turns in your life? Naturalists like Thomas Hardy proposed that some people are simply born under 'a blighted star' like his heroine in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If so, then no matter what we did, we couldn't improve our lives.

For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.

Such times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don't want them to.

Trouble can be purchased cheaply, though the refund may be more than you can bear.

When there is no real hope we must mint our own. If the coin be counterfeit it still may be passed.

And again, damn. Of troubles I considered myself amply possessed. But those who have do seem to get. Some spiritual form of compound interest, I suppose.

I hunted rats and ate out of dustbins and saw my kittens killed and was hung by my tail and abused by wicked urchins," Graymalk said suddenly, "before the mistress found me. She was an orphan who'd lived on the streets. Her life had been even worse.

We all fall but do not all crawl.

Sometimes the mills of the gods grind too damned fast and we get buried in grist

Good Morning. You're in trouble.

No mida kuradit! Lahing ei kuulu alati tugevatele ja võitma kipuvad meeldivad tüübid, sest just nemad kirjutavad pärast mälestusi.

A prisoner of he who has already slain you once, he thought. No doubt near to his place of power, in a cage built just for me. Bad. Bad. There

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

But it was an unrefrigerated world. And everything ended badly.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake

You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair

Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize...

In those days, continued Ishvar, it seemed to me that that was all one could expect in life. A harsh road strewn with sharp stones and, if you were lucky, a little grain. And later? Later I discovered there were different types of roads. And a different way of walking on each.

Losing, and losing again, is the very basis of the life process, till all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.

Miseries of a birth.

The other side of that coin, which Nansen found hard to fathom, was that someone like Shackleton was only true to himself when improvising; fighting against the odds. He would wither in the face of systematic preparation, and only in a crisis did he come into his own.

Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from