Prosperity tries the fortunate; adversity the great.
Be willing to have it so; acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.
Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Fire tries gold, misfortune men.
The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour to the latest generation.
Thou hast shown thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.
I have always been pushed by the negative.... The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
What we want is never simple.
For me life is a challenge. And it will be a challenge if I live to be a hundred or if I get to be a trillionaire.
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.
Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve things, as revenge. To show that I could.
Adversity is, to me at least, a tonic and a bracer.
Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.
