Quotes About Adversity

Our life is a warfare and a mere pilgrimage.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.

Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been.

Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world? neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .

I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.

What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.

Unhappy am I because this has happened to me.- Not so, but happy am I, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.

How unlucky I am that this should happen to me. But not at all. Perhaps, say how lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened, and I am not afraid of what is about to happen. For the same blow might have stricken anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation and complaint.

It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.' No, you should rather say: 'It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.' Because such a thing could have happened to any man, but not every man could have borne it without pain. So why see more misfortune in the event than good fortune in your ability to bear it?

Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, How unlucky that this should happen to me! Not at all! Say instead, How lucky that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint.

Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.

So other people hurt me? That's their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. What is done to me is ordained by nature, what I do by my own.

Never let the future disturb you - you will meet it with the same weapons of reason and mind that, today, guard you against the present...

8. It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out.

Whether you are shivering with cold or too hot, sleepy or wide awake, spoken well of or badly, dying, or doing anything else, do not let it interfere with doing what is right. For whatever causes us to die is also one of life's processes. Even for this, nothing is required of us than to accomplish well the task at hand.

But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble or shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, I have been harmed. Take away the complaint, I have been harmed, and the harm is taken away.   That which does not make a man worse than he was, also does not make his life worse, nor does it harm him either from without or from within.

So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune,' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.

To grieve or be angry about or fear what happens to you is to be a fugitive from the law of nature.