Quotes About Adversity

We have to learn that not everyone deserves our tears. You have to do the right thing even if someone mocks you.

If I can encourage and get somebody to get through what they're dealing with, their set of circumstances, that's the right thing to do.

When you start to get shareholders, clients, employees, rating agencies, and everybody converging, and then your competitors bad-mouth you, you know you did the right thing.

Once your back's up against the wall and you've been beat down, you start looking at trying to do the right thing.

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

The secret of making a mistake is not to regret it, or regret it until a certain point, but to learn from it.

I imagine I was supposed to become a lawyer or something. But this was the Depression; the lawyers I saw were all driving cabs. So I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to be badly off anyway, I might as well be badly off in the theater, where you get used to it.'

When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say, 'Who's that bloke with the funny name?' They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn't afford the electricity. But I would never contemplate changing it. It's who I am.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

I've been told if you're an actress you can't sing, if you're a dancer you can't act, you can't do theatre and be respected if you've done a TV soap, you can't have a No. 1 record. All these different things they've told me I can't do, but I wanted to do them, so I've done them.

When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.

Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.

Mistakes and pressure are inevitable; the secret to getting past them is to stay calm.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

I think death is a crucial element when designing games around the theme of the satisfaction of overcoming overwhelming odds.

The theme of my life is overcoming. It is my personal mantra and what I help other people do.

Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.

Every writer follows a theme, and mine is survival. If you can't figure out what a writer's theme is, look at the books you are attracted to.

a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere. —Frank A. Clark

Listen, young man, everyone has their hard knocks and disappointments. Everyone, not just you. I know for you this is a big one, but it might help to wrap your head around what you have, not what's missing.

big, flat rock face that looks like you shouldn't be able to find anything to hang on to, yet they slithered up to the top like lizards. What does it take to do something like that, Sully?" He swallowed a mouthful.

Life happens that way sometimes. Out of the ashes comes the beauty.

Listen, remember what we've always talked about...change can be good. What feels like a disaster can be your new opportunity.

The thing about the hard times, the stupid times, they make you who you are. And regrets—I look back and ask myself if I didn't do a certain thing that I'm really ashamed of, how would that change the present? What would it erase from my current life? What if I hadn't been such a badass idiot back then? Would I have learned the cost of that recklessness?