Quotes About Adversity

Perhaps they had discovered that when enemies fall, they leave a hole.

I have to fight fire with fire.' 'That'll win you naught but ashes,

The universal law is that the most frustrating thing will always happen, no matter how unlikely.

When we've stood as one, this nation has never ever been defeated, when we've been together, and we're not going to be defeated now. The pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression, two world wars, we overcame them all. And out of each crisis, we emerged stronger and we will again.

My dad always said, 'Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.'

Learn to smile at every situation. See it as an opportunity to prove your strength and ability.

Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.

Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.

What instinct makes one person hold on through intolerable stress, where so many others would panic, freeze, or give up?

If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn't in the Bible, but maybe it should've been.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life

If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils.

Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.

Basically, it comes down do this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you.

Out of the frying pan and into the Fireman.

It was bad enough to be stuck in a pipe with a porcupine, worse to be in there with a lunatic, even if the lunatic happened to be herself.

She banged the stick against the side of the pipe, drew it back, and lanced it at the porcupine. "I'll be a candle right up your ass, you don't keep waddling, fat boy," she half sang, half choked. He

Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling. The

It is all right to cry but don't give up on laughter. Don't give up on happiness. You need both. I had both.

Most human lives were and are too short. Most people have lived out their days hungry and barefoot, on the run from this war and that famine, a plague here and a flood there. But people have to sing anyway. Even a baby that hasn't been fed in days will stop crying and look around when they hear someone singing in joy. You sing and it's like giving a thirsty person water. It's a kindness. It makes you shine.

It's a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer.

But they could not stay, because you could not raise a baby in a trench.

But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn't get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone's thumb, and if you wanted mother's little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don't come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.