Awesome Quotes and Sayings About Adversity
Quotations & Citations:
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
~M. Kathleen Casey
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
~Winston Churchill
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
~ Haruki Murakami
The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.
~William Shakespeare, Othello
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
~ Abraham Lincoln
I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.
~Mother Teresa
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
~ Maya Angelou
The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
~Harry Golden
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
~ Edgar Allan Poe
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
These are the times that try men’s souls.
~ Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
You can’t run away from trouble. There ain’t no place that far.
~Uncle Remus
Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
~ Oprah Winfrey
Enduring habits I hate…. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
It isn’t as bad as you sometimes think it is. It all works out. Don’t worry. I say that to myself every morning. It all works out in the end. Put your trust in God, and move forward with faith and confidence in the future. The Lord will not forsake us. He will not forsake us. If we will put our trust in Him, if we will pray to Him, if we will live worthy of His blessings, He will hear our prayers.
~ Gordon B. Hinckley
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t embrace trouble; that’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way.
~ Terry Goodkind
The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he’s got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
~Rona Barrett
Sometimes things have to go wrong in order to go right.
~ Sherrilyn Kenyon
Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.
~Garth Brooks
But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you’d get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you’ll never really enjoy it when things go right.
~ Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
~Garrison Keillor
No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse.
~ Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
~Erich Fromm
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.
~Jewish Proverb
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
~ Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
~Rose F. Kennedy
I love those who can smile in trouble…
~ Leonardo da Vinci
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.
~Henry Ward Beecher
You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.
~ Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Turn your wounds into wisdom.
~Oprah Winfrey
Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
~Frank A. Clark
Hardships make or break people.
~ Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
As long as you keep getting born, it’s alright to die some times.
~Orson Scott Card
You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.
~ Mary Tyler Moore
If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.
~ Criss Jami, Killosophy
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
~Kenji Miyazawa
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
~ Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Bad is never good until worse happens.
~Danish Proverb
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
~ Seneca
You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
~Walt Disney
Reputation is what others think of us; character is what God knows of us. When you have spent what feels like eternity trying to repair a few moments of time that destroyed the view others once had of you then you must ask yourself if you have the problem or is it really them? God doesn’t make us try so hard, only enemies do.
~ Shannon L. Alder
When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.
~Barbara Bloom
Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success, every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and fulfillment.
~ Og Mandino
There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
~Lou Reed, Magic and Loss
When faced with two equally tough choices, most people choose the third choice: to not choose.
~ Jarod Kintz, This Book Title is Invisible
We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them.
~Charles C. West
We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world
~ Helen Keller
If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.
~Mary Engelbreit
To live is to war with trolls.
~ Henrik Ibsen
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
~Theodore Rubin
You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.
~Shannon L. Alder
Every path hath a puddle.
~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
Sometimes your light shines so bright that it blinds people from seeing who you really are.
~ Shannon L. Alder
A bad grade is only one letter in the Essay of life.
~Lee Drake
The roughest roads often lead to the top.
~ Christina Aguilera
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
~Agatha Christie
Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.
~ Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Sometimes in tragedy we find our life’s purpose — the eye sheds a tear to find its focus.
~Robert Brault
Our most significant opportunities will be found in times of greatest difficulty.
~ Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often those that criticize others reveal what he himself lacks.
~ Shannon L. Alder
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
~Colette
The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.
~ Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
Sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.
~Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn
Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.
~ Aristotle
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
~African Proverb
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;
Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, In the Harbor
There is no education like adversity.
~Disraeli
Bullying builds character like nuclear waste creates superheroes. It’s a rare occurrence and often does much more damage than endowment.
~ Zack W. Van
We find comfort among those who agree with us — growth among those who don’t.
~Frank A. Clark