Quotes About Adversity

When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

We live in exciting times, says the radio. We make no complaints. We will plant our feet firmly in our earth, and no attack will move us.

Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled all around it.

See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspirations.

but it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding.

Only about one in fifteen great grey eggs hatch and make it to adulthood. Hatchlings get eaten by ravens, martens, black bears, and great horned owls; nestlings often starve. Because they require such extensive hunting grounds, great greys are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss: cattle trample meadows, decimating prey numbers; wildfires incinerate nesting areas; the owls eat rodents that have eaten poison, die in vehicle collisions, and fly into utility wires.

Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind.

As if, at every meal, the cadets fill their tin cups not with the cold mineralized water of Schulpforta but with a spirit that leaves them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying forever drunk on rigor and exercise and gleaming boot leather.

Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?

Recuérdate, hijo —dice—, no hay clima malo, solo ropa mala.

Che cosa non ha fatto, la guerra, ai sognatori.

The Americans were badly discouraged. Twelve days to go, stripped of their gear, sniffling, they huddled in a Kraków McDonald's and invoked middle-school platitudes about Cornwallis's surrender and Valley Forge, about pitching crates of tea into Boston Harbor and bloody-soled snow marches for the good of the Republic. We must not quit now, they mumbled, and dipped their chicken nuggets into a tasteless sauce.

Veja os obstáculos como oportunidades. Veja os obstáculos como inspirações.

Every second, walking those two hundred meters, is like leaping into very cold water, in that first instant when the body goes into shock, and everything you are, everything you call your life, disintegrates for an instant, and all you have around you is the water and the cold, your heart trying to send splinters through a block of ice.

Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.

When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.

Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.

A failure is not a reason to stop. It's a reason to start again, and harder.

Don't be pushed by your problems, swim in them

Falling down is the first step towards coming back stronger

It was about such people that he complained to Atticus: "I will only say this, and I believe you know I am right: it was not enemies but jealous friends who ruined me.

Presumably a storm did overtake Octavius, for he apparently suffered a shipwreck before reaching his destination.