- Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster children into strength and athletic proportion.
- Adversity is the first path to truth.
- Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
- A diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor the man perfected without trials.
- The best way out of a difficulty is through it.
- Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.
- Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
- Common and vulgar people ascribe all ills that hey feel to others; people of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one.
- The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.
- In misfortune, what friend remains a friend.
- Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain.
- Human misery must somewhere have a stop: there is no wind that always blows a storm.
- A time of disarray is also a moment of opportunity.
- A romantic plants bestow no spicy fragnance while they grow; but crush'd or trodden to the ground, diffuse their balmy sweets around.
- Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
- Greater dooms win greater destinies.
- When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog will kick it.
- Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
- Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.
- Adversity borrows its sharpest sting from our impatience.
- Prosperity is not without many fears and distaste; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
- Prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue.
- No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.
- Adversity makes men and prosperity makes monsters.
- As riches and favor forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool, but nobody could find it out in his prosperity.
- The nearer the dawn the darker the night.
- Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
- Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
- Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortune.
- With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.
- Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?
- To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn; and that which he will have the most need to know.
- We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.
- The good things of prosperity are to be admired.
- Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy.
- Sweet are the uses of adversity.
- Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
- One's own escape from troubles makes one glad; but bringing friends to trouble is hard grief.
- It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made.
- To be unable to bear an ill is itself a great ill.
- Learn to see in another's calamity the kills which you should avoid.
- If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
- Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
- Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.
