Quotes About Adversity

The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

— Walter Bagehot

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

— Seneca the Younger

Have the courage to face a difficulty lest it kick you harder than you bargained for.

— Stanislaus

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

— Woodrow Wilson

I don’t say embrace trouble.  That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy.  But I do say meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Trouble is a part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.

— Dinah Shore

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

— Anna Bradstreet

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

— George Bernard Shaw

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

— Charles Dickens

Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist — it reduces him to his fighting weight.

— Josh Billings

Watch a man in times of ... adversity to discover what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off.

— Lucretius

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.

— Horace

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it.  Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

— André Gide

Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then.

— Samuel Johnson

The world is quickly bored with the recital of misfortune and willingly avoids the sight of distress.

— W. Somerset Maugham

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

— G. K. Chesterton

A woman is like a teabag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.

— Nancy Reagan

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.

— William Hazlitt

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.

— Cicero

Each handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along, too.

— Lawrence Bixby

The course of true love never did run smooth.

— William Shakespeare

Diligence overcomes difficulties; sloth makes them.

— Benjamin Franklin

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson