quotations and passages on adversity

Never forget that God tests his real friends
more severely than the lukewarm ones.

Kathryn Hulme

The first question to be answered by any individual or any social group,
facing a hazardous situation, is whether the crisis is to be met as
a challenge to strength or as an occasion for despair.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

M. Scott Peck

Adversity, if for no other reason, is of benefit, since it is sure to bring
a season of sober reflection. People see clearer at such times.
Storms purify the atmosphere.

Henry Ward Beecher

You can think about your problems or you can worry about them, and there is
a vast difference between the two. Worry is thinking that has turned toxic.
It is jarring music that goes round and round and never comes to either
climax or conclusion. Thinking works its way through problems
to conclusions and decisions; worry leaves you in a state of tensely
suspended animation. When you worry, you go over the same ground endlessly
and come out the same place you started. Thinking makes progress from one place
to another; worry remains static. The problem of life is to change worry
into thinking and anxiety into creative action.

Harold B. Walker

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us,
as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

James Russell Lowell

I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below high-water mark I stopped and read the words again:
WRITE YOUR WORRIES ON THE SAND.
I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words, one above the other.
Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand.
The tide was coming in.

Arthur Gordon

Certain circumstances are so overwhelmingly difficult that the best
we can do to promote our eventual healing is simply to mark time,
stay alive, and bear up under the worst of our suffering. . . .

Ann Kaiser Stearns

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venemous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt in public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

William Shakespeare

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire,
but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped
to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant.
We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were
absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it,
led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past,
we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

Marcel Proust

Only in winter can you tell which trees are truly green.
Only when the winds of adversity blow can you tell
whether an individual or a country has steadfastness.

John F. Kennedy

People of character find a special attractiveness in difficulty,
since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty
that they can realize their potentialities.

Charles
DeGaulle

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach

We could never learn to be brave and patient,
if there were only joy in the world.

Helen Keller

I am an old man and have known
a great many troubles, but most
of them have never happened.

Mark Twain

Nothing happens to anybody which they are not fitted by nature to bear.

Marcus Aurelius

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To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into
the very lap of fortune, for our faculties then undergo
a development and display an energy of which
they were previously unsusceptible.

Benjamin Franklin

If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience
develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy,
however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.

John R. Miller

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Edwin H. Chapin

Adversity is the trial of principle.
Without it people hardly know
whether they are honest or not.

Henry Fielding

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to show us the value of a job.

Victor Hugo

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater.
Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.

William Hazlitt

Kites rise highest against the wind--
not with it.

Winston Churchill

Adversity causes some people to break;
others to break records.

William A. Ward

It was a high speech of Seneca that "The good things which belong
to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong
to adversity are to be admired."

Francis Bacon

As the valley gives height to the mountain,
so can sorrow give meaning to pleasure;
as the well is the source of the fountain,
deep adversity can be a treasure.

William Ward

The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship
I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures
I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer
because of the memories of this I was enduring.

Louis L'Amour

Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all,
the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity.

Robert Burton

We cannot be guilty of a greater act of uncharitableness,
than to interpret the afflictions which befall our neighbors
as punishments and judgments.

Joseph Addison

It appears that when life is broken by tragedy God shines through the breach.

George A. Buttrick

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

Edwin Hubbell Chapman

In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage.
In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time.

Robert Collier

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education.
To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun.
To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.

Epictetus

Those who know no hardships will know no hardihood.
Those who face no calamity will need no courage.
Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature
which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

There is in every person'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

You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden,
but you will grow if you are sick, in pain, experience losses,
and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain
and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment,
but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross