Motivational Quotes

Adversity

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Adversity

Adversity is a fact of life. It can't be controlled. What we can control is how we react to it.

Just because Fate doesn?t deal you the right cards, it doesn?t mean you should give up. It just means you have to play the cards you get to their maximum potential.

Brown, Les

Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, Shake well before using. That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.

Havner, Vance

He who knows the darkness shall learn to live in the light.

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.

Scott, Sir Walter

There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.

Colton, Charles Caleb

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

Horace

If the going is real easy, beware, you may be headed down hill and don't know it.

Only entropy comes easy.

Mumford, Lewis

10.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The hardest struggle of all is to be something different from what the average man is.

Schwab, Charles M.

12.

They sicken at the calm that know the storm.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time.

Byron, Lord

14.

Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skeptical.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

15.

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for it.

Warren, Earl

16.

When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

17.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

Tagore, Rabindranath

19.

Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out. He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God. Consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself.

Chambers, Oswald

21.

We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.

Beecher, Henry Ward

22.

Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

Zwanzig, Carl

23.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

Weltman, Phil

24.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

25.

Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? It is a frightening and sacred moment. There is no return. One's life is charged forever. It is the fire that gives us our shape.

Richards, Mary Caroline

26.

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.

Alcott, Louisa May

27.

Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilization and mental culture.

Joshee, Anandabai

28.

Every burden is a blessing.

Schuller, Robert H.

29.

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Angelis, Barbara De

30.

Adversities do not make a man frail. They show what sort of man he is.

Kempis, Thomas

31.

We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.

Grant, Hanmer Parsons

32.

Stumbling is not falling.

Proverb, Portuguese

33.

There could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.

Lawrence, Thomas E.

34.

It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don't even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don't just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES. The beliefs are the direct cause of what we feel and what we do next. They can spell the difference between dejection and giving up, on the one hand, and well-being and constructive action on the other. The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence. The second step is to see how the ABCs operate every day in your own life.

Seligman, Martin E. P.

35.

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

Walton, Sam

36.

They that sow in tears shall reap joy. [Psalms 126:5]

Bible

37.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

38.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

The greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake.

Sting

41.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

People are like stained -- glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within

Ross, Elizabeth Kubler

43.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?

Kennedy, Rose F.

44.

Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds; all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

Hale, Edward Everett

45.

Cushion the painful effects of hard blows by keeping the enthusiasm going strong, even if doing so requires struggle.

Peale, Norman Vincent

46.

What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.