Motivational Quotes

Adversity

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

- Gibran, Kahlil

Best Quotes about Adversity

Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time.

Byron, Lord

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.

Horace

Every hardship; every joy; every temptation is a challenge of the spirit; that the human soul may prove itself. The great chain of necessity wherewith we are bound has divine significance; and nothing happens which has not some service in working out the sublime destiny of the human soul.

Ford, Elias A.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.

Stumbling is not falling.

Proverb, Portuguese

Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it. [Mathew 7:13-14]

Bible

All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today.

Ransom, Ralph

Adversities do not make a man frail. They show what sort of man he is.

Kempis, Thomas

10.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

A reasonable amount o fleas is good for a dog -- keeps him from brooding over being a dog, maybe.

Westcott, Edward Noyes

13.

Your dips an falls do not confound me, half as much as your heights astound me.

14.

The difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is how you use them

15.

I didn't know I'd have to be torn down before I could be built up.

16.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Roethke, Theodore

17.

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

Horace

18.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains

Cady, Emilie

19.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

Keats, John

20.

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.

Wells, H.G.

21.

When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out. He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God. Consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself.

Chambers, Oswald

22.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

Tagore, Rabindranath

23.

What is to give light must endure the burning.

Frankl, Viktor E.

24.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

People are like stained -- glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within

Ross, Elizabeth Kubler

26.

Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, grow, grow.

Talmud, The

27.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?

Kennedy, Rose F.

28.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

Tagore, Rabindranath

29.

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Horace

30.

The proof of gold is fire...

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Devito, Danny

32.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

33.

It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.

Heraclitus

34.

Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?

Qur'an

35.

If we study the lives of great men and women carefully and unemotionally we find that, invariably, greatness was developed, tested and revealed through the darker periods of their lives. One of the largest tributaries of the RIVER OF GREATNESS is always the STREAM OF ADVERSITY.

Robert, Cavett

36.

In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

Leonard, George

37.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

38.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

Seneca

39.

He who knows the darkness shall learn to live in the light.

40.

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Angelis, Barbara De

41.

We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more although abounding in wealth, who are wretched.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

42.

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

Post, Laurens Van du

43.

If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs, its just possible you haven't grasped the situation.

Kerr, Jean

44.

You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut.

Maltz, Maxwell

45.

Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.

Winfrey, Oprah

46.

That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commence with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.

Pike, Albert

47.

Adversity is, to me at least, a tonic and a bracer.

Scott, Sir Walter

48.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

49.

If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them.

Johnson

50.

Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.