Adversity Quotes

"Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty - I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a bore-hole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps."

- Kemi Badenoch

"Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success."

- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

"Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is."

- William Glasser

"Education...is a painful, continual, and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning...by praise, but above all, by example."

- John Ruskin

"Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task."

- Haim Ginott

"If you want to test a man's character, give him power."

- Abraham Lincoln

"The clouds I can handle, but I can't fight with an eclipse."

- Stephenie Meyer

"—Acostumbraba a pensar en ti de ese modo, ya sabes, como el sol. Tu luz compensaba sobradamente mis sombras. Él suspiró. —Soy capaz de manejar las sombras, pero no de luchar contra un eclipse. •Ética, 591"

- Stephenie Meyer

"No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you'll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness."

- Garth Risk Hallberg

"No one could look at the beautiful young man now. They dropped their eyes from the scalding sight. From the eclipse. As all that love turned into hate."

- Louise Penny

"Prisons, far from providing a path to redemption, often exacerbate the very issues they aim to resolve."

- Rove Monteux

"All I want is to be in a place I’m not trying to get out of."

- Richard Stark

"None of my peers avoided prison. None of 'em."

- Nipsey Hussle

"Mandela did go to prison, and he went in there as a burning revolutionary. But look what came out. Mandela let us down."

- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

"My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms."

- Susan Polis Schutz

"Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open."

- Bernard Kerik

"I still remember, 40 years ago, when I was shackled and put in prison... Being an American citizen didn't mean a thing."

- Fred Korematsu

"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown."

- Thich Nhat Hanh

"Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure."

- Stephen King

"The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death."

- James H. Cone

"Failed suicide gives a long life in a wheelchair"

- Tamerlan Kuzgov

"Suicide isn't always mean to kill yourself. Sometimes, it means to ruin yourself."

- Tamerlan Kuzgov

"Causes of suicide are cheaper than life."

- Tamerlan Kuzgov

"You can’t expect great success without encountering great challenges."

- Deion Sanders

"I felt like a deer with a hundred hunters after me."

- Deion Sanders

"When we have public success we also have private struggles."

- Deion Sanders

"I was kinda scared. I thought Detroit was gonna take me. I would’ve asked them for so much money they would have to put me on layaway."

- Deion Sanders

"We've got a thing called the 'tall poppy syndrome' in New Zealand, where if anyone is doing really well, it's quite common to try and bring them down - like, cut them down and say, 'You've been to the moon? So what? I mean, plenty of people have been to the moon.'"

- Taika Waititi

"Swimming is one of the hardest sports."

- Stephanie Rice

"Crucifixion was a death worthy to have been invented by devils. The pain, which it involved, was immeasurable. I will not torture you by describing it. I know dear hearts that cannot read of it without tears and without lying awake for nights afterwards."