Thomas More Quotes

The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.

Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.

We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome.

No matter what is going on in your life today, remember, it is only preparation. People come and go; situations rise and fall; it's all preparation for better things. You must stretch, reach, grow into your goodness. Without the preparation we receive through adversity, disappointment, confusion, or pain, we could not appreciate the goodness when it arrives.

It's not the circumstances that determine who you're gonna be but how you deal with these problems and pains that come your way.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

As the most generous vine, if it is not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems, and grows at last weak and fruitless; so dote the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions. If it be painful to bleed, it is worse to wither. Let me be pruned, that I may grow, rather than be cut up to burn.

The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.

Suffering is a good teacher. It keeps you in its grip until you've learned your lesson.

Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.

It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip.

None of us can come to the highest maturity without enduring the summer heat of trials.

Grace grows best in winter.

Life is not about focusing on the obstacles. It's about how you handle them, and whether you get enlightenment or levity from the way you do it

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.

Think of the ills from which you are exempt, and it will aid you to bear patiently those which now you may suffer.

God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

In that I found being able to talk to my family about my feelings, praying for strength and realizing that our lives have a deep purpose and the journey of our lives is to find out what that is and express it, was the only way I could have gotten through it.

You have to accept the storms and the rainy days and the things in life that you sometimes don't want to face.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

When you have bad moments, you have to improve. You have to become stronger to deal with it, and I believe I have become stronger.

We all go through things in life. You try to stay positive, but you can't ignore bad things that happen. You just try to work through them.