Beverly Sills Quotes

Sometimes poverty is the greatest gift you can ever be given. Sometimes loss is the key that leads you to gain.

To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

You have to remember that the hard days are what make you stronger. The bad days make you realize what a good day is. If you never had any bad days, you would never have that sense of accomplishment!

Life stinks, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy it.

When people see what I have now, they have no idea of where I came from and how I didn't have anything growing up.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

Whenever I'm on my way to a premiere or something, I always have a good laugh in the car... because it's all so absurd - I'm one generation removed from starvation.

Life's pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can. -Isabel Culpeper

It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me...if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me.

Losing a basketball game hurts but when you see what you've been through, you look on it and say well if this is the worst thing that can happen to me, then I'm okay.

To live in the midst of suffering, which we do, we do, amid distress, and to keep some equilibrium in the midst of that - that would be happiness enough.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

When you are at the bottom, you find beauty in such little things, and goodness in such little gestures. When I compare any struggle today to ones that I may have had in my childhood, there is nothing that can bring me down.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.

No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to except them and to live through them.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

Cutting one side of your head for a few months is not a big deal compared with what other people have to deal with in the world. Plus, hair grows back.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

A good thing to remember is somebody's got it a lot worse than we do.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

I have survived and possibly I should not hope for more than that.