Adversity Quotes
Tough times never last. Tough people do.
—Author Unknown
Problems are not stop signs. They are guidelines.
—Robert Schuller
Don’t let a bad day make you feel like you have a bad life.
—Author Unknown
The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world.
—President Barack Obama, farewell press conference, January 18, 2017
Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
—Hugh Miller, Snow on the Wind
You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.
—J.K. Rowling
In prosperity our friends know us. In adversity we know our friends.
—John Churton Collins
The gem cannot be polished without friction nor man without trials.
—Confucius
If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?
—Rumi
Ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.
—Jewish Proverb
Bad is never good until worse happens.
—Danish Proverb
Problems are the price you pay for progress.
—Branch Rickey
Pain is weakness leaving the body.
—United States Marine Corps
The distinguishing mark of true adventures is that it is often no fun at all while they are actually happening.
—Kim Stanley Robinson
Adventure is just bad planning.
—Roald Amundsen
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
—G.K. Chesterton
Look back at your life. It’s always the hardest times that made you who you are.
—Casey Neistat
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
—Sophocles
Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.
—Author Unknown
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
—Duke Ellington
Scars are tattoos with better stories.
—From a Toyota advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine
Every flower must grow through dirt.
—Proverb
At times, challenges hit with the force of a roaring, rushing waterfall. The true test, however, is whether you can put your arms up and enjoy the feel of the water.
—Aviva Kaufman
Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaningful existence. I can handle that.
—Jeb Dickerson
Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.
—Josephine Hart
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
—Horace
Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.
—Stephen Covey
…once the storm is over you won’ remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, 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 what this storm’s all about.
—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Sometimes you have to breakdown before you can breakthrough.
—Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008)
Problems are messages.
—Shakti Gawain
Never was anything great achieved without danger.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
—Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.
—Norman Vincent Peale
We have no right to ask when sorrow comes “Why did this happen to me?” unless we ask the same question for every moment of happiness that comes our way.
—Author Unknown
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adversity is the first path to truth.
—Lord Byron
A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity ‘til he has tasted adversity.
—Sa’di
There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas
Sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.
—Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn
There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
—Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820
Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.
—Josh Billings
Turn your wounds into wisdom.
—Oprah Winfrey
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.
—Oscar Wilde
He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
—Rose F. Kennedy
Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.
—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
As long as you keep getting born, it’s alright to die some times.
—Orson Scott Card
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
—African Proverb
May you get what you wish for.
—Old Chinese Curse
Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.
—Charles Caleb Colton
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
—Kenji Miyazawa
Use your enemy’s arrows for firewood.
—Matshona Dhliwayo
It just wouldn’t be a picnic without the ants.
—Author Unknown
The Lord gives us friends to push us to our potential—and enemies to push us beyond it.
—Robert Brault
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
—Duke Ellington
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
—Francis Bacon
Everybody ought to do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
—William James
Scars remind us where we’ve been—they don’t have to dictate where we’re going.
—Jeff
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.
—Lord Byron
Criminal Minds.
—Davis, Rick Dunkle, and Oanh Ly
When you’re feeling your worst, that’s when you get to know yourself the best.
—Leslie Grossman
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
—Cicero
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Addiction
Addictions started out like magical poets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came through some gradual, dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life decisions. And they were…less intelligent than goldfish. William Gibson
Addiction is the only prison where the locks are on the inside.??
Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.
—Martin Amis
