Quotes About Adversity

My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin cushion...Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.

Sebastian contra mundum.

Most of us struggle to get by, confused by what we perceive to be out there, life a series of disappointments and putdowns.

This is not a time for hereos because nobody will let it happen

I'm sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

I don't want to sound like Pollyanna, she began, but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith- faith in the eternal resilience of me- that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide- not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often- and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

Now you've a clean start... you've brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

O ümitlerdir ki ÅŸimdi sefer etmekteyiz, biz o ak?nt?ya kar?? giden tekneler, durmadan geriye geçmiÅŸe çarp?l?p at?lsak da ne gam..

I've never met a man who led a rotten life and didn't have a weak will.

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances... Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of circumstances.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement --discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality—a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death.