QUOTES ON ADVERSITY

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

FRANCIS BACON, Essays

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

Everyone has to have either this or that problem, if he can't find any problem, he loses all reason for living.

GAO XINGJIAN, Nocturnal Wanderer

A little bit of pain is good for you. I feel alive. Everybody needs struggle. Once you overcome an obstacle, you springboard into the future. Life is interesting and short and it's not supposed to be easy, and if it is, you're probably just in denial and you're existing here like a zombie.

PAMELA ANDERSON

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

ANNE BRADSTREET, Meditations Divine and Moral

One must not try to trick misfortune, but resign oneself to it with good grace.

ARISTOPHANES, The Thesmophoriazusae

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

CARL JUNG, The Transcendent Function

That thorny path, those stormy skies,
Have drawn our spirits nearer;
And rendered us, by sorrow's ties,
Each to the other dearer.

BERNARD BARTON, Not Ours the Vows

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New.

FRANCIS BACON, Essays

It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.

SAM, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

People never fail to amaze me. They face the unimaginable with a shot of grace and a rush of adrenaline; they steel their nerves; they summon their cool or anger or faith or whatever it takes to pull them through, and they go on to live another day.

OPRAH WINFREY, O Magazine, Apr. 2007

There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it; its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Twilight of the Idols