Adversity Quotes

"Tears come from the heart and not from the brain."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Sadness flies away on the wings of time."

- Jean de La Fontaine

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

- Rumi

"Then came July like three o'clock in the afternoon, hot and listless and miserable."

- Allie Ray

"Autumn frosts have slain July."

- Lewis Carroll

"There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it."

- Karlheinz Stockhausen

"Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist."

- Franz Liszt

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

- Albert Einstein

"The harder the battle, the sweeter the victory."

- Les Brown

"It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."

- Jimmy Dugan

"So often in life things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune."

- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"Good luck has its storms."

- George Lucas

"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it."

- Russell Baker

"The end-of-summer winds make people restless."

- Sebastian Faulks

"Challenges are what makes life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful."

- Joshua J. Marine

"Adversity and perseverance and all these things can shape you. They can give you a value and a self-esteem that is priceless."

- Scott Hamilton

"A diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor a person perfected without trials."

- Warren Buffett

"Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with."

- Thomas Carlyle

"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."

- T.S. Eliot

"Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear."

- Michelle Obama

"Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand."

- Oprah Winfrey

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. If we did not sometimes taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

- Josh Billings

"It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them."

- Jennifer Niven

"Because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

- Sylvia Plath

"Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever."

- Susanna Kaysen

"Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re ‘not at all like yourself but will be soon,’ but you know you won’t."

- Kay Redfield Jamison

"Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength."

- Charles Spurgeon

"Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations."

"So fickle and strange is the human anxiety, Years passed in complaining that there’s no time from work, Today when there’s time the complain is that there’s no work."