Adversity Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Sir Winston Churchill,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Mignon McLaughlin,
Antonio Porchia,
William Shakespeare
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| The misfortunes of mankind are of varied plumage. |
| - Aeschylus |
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| Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it. |
| - Jean Anouilh |
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| A bend in the road is not the end of the road... unless you fail to make the turn. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Adversity introduces a man to himself. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Sometimes the littlest things in life are the hardest to take. You can sit on a mountain more comfortably than on a tack. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| There are times in everyone's life when something constructive is born out of adversity... when things seem so bad that you've got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| We have no right to ask when sorrow comes, "Why did this happen to me?" unless we ask the same question for every moment of happiness that comes our way. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| You never know what you've got until it's gone. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Count the garden by the flowers, never by the leaves that fall. Count your life with smiles and not the tears that roll. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles. |
| - Maltbie D. Babcock |
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| Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. |
| - Francis Bacon |
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| The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them. |
| - Bernard M. Baruch |
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| God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
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| You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. |
| - Henry Ward Beecher |
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| Calamity, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. |
| - Ambrose Bierce |
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| Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight. |
| - Josh Billings |
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| It's not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line. |
| - Ashleigh Brilliant |
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| Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. |
| - Garth Brooks |
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| If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim. |
| - H. Jackson Jr. Brown |
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| He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| The course of true anything never does run smooth. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| Adversity is the first path to truth. |
| - Lord Byron |
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| As long as you keep getting born, it's alright to die some times. |
| - Orson Scott Card |
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| The horror of that moment, the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it. |
| - Lewis Carroll |
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| There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men. |
| - Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort |
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| Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. |
| - Agatha Christie |
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| Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| If you're going through hell, keep going. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness. |
| - Cicero |
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| If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere. |
| - Frank A. Clark |
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| We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't. |
| - Frank A. Clark |
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| Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery. |
| - Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
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| I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering. |
| - Colette |
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| You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. |
| - Walt Disney |
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| Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| We acquire the strength we have overcome. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it. |
| - Mary Engelbreit |
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| Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything. |
| - William Faulkner |
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| In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. |
| - F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. |
| - Erich Fromm |
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| I had a lover's quarrel with the world. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. |
| - Robert Fulghum |
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| Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. |
| - Bill Gates |
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| Problems are messages. |
| - Shakti Gawain |
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| Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.... Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.... |
| - Kahlil Gibran |
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| Much of your pain is self-chosen. |
| - Kahlil Gibran |
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| I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress. |
| - André Gide |
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| Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. |
| - Arthur Golden |
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| The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work. |
| - Harry Golden |
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| Hardship is best sailed with a heart ship. |
| - Terri Guillemets |
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| How can something bother you if you won't let it? |
| - Terri Guillemets |
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| In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. |
| - Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures. |
| - William Hazlitt |
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| Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. |
| - William Hazlitt |
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| Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. |
| - O. Henry |
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| If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't 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, Sr. Holmes |
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| Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than of war. |
| - Homer |
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| Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant. |
| - Horace |
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| 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 |
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| Everybody ought to do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice. |
| - William James |
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| Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. |
| - Garrison Keillor |
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| When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity. |
| - John F. Kennedy |
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| Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good. |
| - Lucy Larcom |
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| The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. |
| - Max Lerner |
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| Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. |
| - James Russell Lowell |
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| 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 |
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| No man ought to lay a cross upon himself, or to adopt tribulation, as is done in popedom; but if a cross or tribulation come upon him, then let him suffer it patiently, and know that it is good and profitable for him. |
| - Martin Luther |
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| Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out. |
| - Edwin Markham |
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| People don't ever seem to relate that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune. |
| - William McFee |
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| A new wound makes all the old ones ache again. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Despair is anger with no place to go. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them. |
| - Hugh Miller |
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| We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. |
| - Kenji Miyazawa |
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| There are some defeats more triumphant than victories. |
| - Michel de Montaigne |
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| He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds. |
| - Norman Vincent Peale |
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| The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. |
| - Norman Vincent Peale |
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| Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless. If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| The cold is a good counselor, but it is cold. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. |
| - Marcel Proust |
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| Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. |
| - African Proverb |
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| Bad is never good until worse happens. |
| - Danish Proverb |
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| Every path has its puddle. |
| - English Proverb |
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| I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders. |
| - Jewish Proverb |
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| If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. |
| - Latin Proverb |
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| Better bread with water than cake with trouble. |
| - Russian Proverb |
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| If the thunder is not loud, the peasant forgets to cross himself. |
| - Russian Proverb |
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| Bygone troubles are good to tell. |
| - Yiddish Proverb |
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| God gave burdens, also shoulders. |
| - Yiddish Proverb |
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| There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out. |
| - Lou Reed |
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| Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm. When a storm approaches thee, be as fragrant as a sweet-smelling flower. |
| - Jean Paul Richter |
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| Problems are the price you pay for progress. |
| - Branch Rickey |
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| Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. |
| - Rainer Maria Rilke |
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| Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. |
| - Rainer Maria Rilke |
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| To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity. |
| - Sa'Di |
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| Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings. |
| - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
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| It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity. |
| - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
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| Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course. |
| - William Shakespeare |
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| Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse. |
| - William Shakespeare |
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| The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief. |
| - William Shakespeare |
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| If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change. |
| - John A, Sr. Simone |
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| There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury. |
| - Alexander Smith |
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| If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. |
| - Socrates |
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| The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. |
| - Sophocles |
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| I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. |
| - William Stafford |
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| It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. |
| - John Steinbeck |
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| I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. |
| - Mother Teresa |
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| If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. |
| - John Updike |
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| I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time. |
| - Sam Walton |
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| In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| Turn your wounds into wisdom. |
| - Oprah Winfrey |
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| The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. |
| - Virginia Woolf |
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