Quotes About Adversity

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

It was the middle of winter, Con Edison had shut off my power, and I didn't have an agent. I made this VHS tape of some monologues, but I didn't even have the money for a MetroCard. So I walked the tapes 'round to the different agencies in town.

We were just covered in dirt the whole time. It was so hot - and that was in winter. I can not imagine what it's like in summer and how the people who actually live out there survive.

I was in Cuba in the winter of 1937. I was playing in Cuba, and I'm in the shower, and I slipped and caught myself with my right arm. I felt something pull right then. Then, in '38, when I came back, my arm was messed up.

When I was growing up, my parents were too cheap to buy a snowblower, so my crippled butt was out clearing the whole driveway every winter. It was hell.

My mother often used to speak about her time during the war and during the famous hunger winter in Holland - in the latter part of the war there was no heating and very little food and so her mother used to say, 'You stay in bed most of the day to preserve your calories.'

She often used to talk about the fact that during the war, her mother, because there was a little food and no heating, would have her stay in bed throughout the day, especially during the Dutch Hunger Winter, to preserve her calories.

The coming and going of the seasons give us more than the springtimes, summers, autumns, and winters of our lives. It reflects the coming and going of the circumstances of our lives like the glassy surface of a pond that shows our faces radiant with joy or contorted with pain.

I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

Swedish winters are not for the faint of heart.

I am getting some good offers still. Some nice things are coming my way just as they always have, so unless I lose my inspiration or there is too much drool to wipe, I will keep going.

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Wipe the tears away, stand up, be a man, run your business, find a way.

When you wipe out, all you can do is let the wave take you and stay calm until you can come up for air.

I can't go on the court crying because then it's a big advantage for my opponent, so I have to wipe my tears, have a good warm-up, feel the ball and then start grooving in the game.

If you operate in fear, it can just wipe you out.

I was supposed to be in 'The Wire' but I was getting in trouble in school and on the streets.

What ultimately makes 'The Wire' uplifting amid the heartbreak it conveys is its embodiment of a spirit that Barack Obama calls 'the audacity of hope.' It is filled with characters who should quit but don't, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons who lose their hearts to them.

My approach in 1999 was basically to play what I had, that was all I could do. At the time I was broke. I think I only had one guitar, a flametop green Jackson and I had these DC-10 Mesa Boogie heads. I think I had a cheap Shure wireless.

For the better half of my early 20s, I was Bubble Girl. When I found out I had leukemia at 22 my world suddenly dwindled to four white walls, a hospital bed, fluorescent lights and a thicket of tubes and wires connecting me to an IV pole.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.

If fortune favors you do not be elated; if she frowns do not despond.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.