Theodore Parker Quotes

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

Hope itself is like a star- not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.

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.

We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.

When I am made fun of in the press I just remember those days when I'd come home to find that the water had been turned off because my mother couldn't afford the bill. Suddenly, everything feels easier.

We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

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

When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.

Cover this confirmation process with prayer. When they make it harder for us to pray, we just pray harder.

Mama tried to save us from the streets, but the streets were too strong.

To the stars through thorns.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

Hope is the poor man's bread.

When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.

I believe it is only when one comes out of adversity, that one starts to see real beauty.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

The reason so many of us struggle so intensely with adversity is that we have yet to adopt God's perspective and priorities.

He was never without misery, and never without hope.

Hope is the poor man's bread.

Picture me inside the misery of poverty, no man alive has ever witnessed struggles ive survived, praying hard for better days promised to hold on me and my dogs aint have a choice but to hold on.

When things get bad enough, your only resort is to lie in bed and start praying.

That is when you need faith the most. Not when everything is going your way, not when you have much to be thankful for, but when there is darkness all around.

Come out to view / the truth of flowers blooming / in poverty.

I think one of the first things to go as people's lives start to go down is their dreams. Dreams should be the last thing to go - dreams are the things you go down with. If you're left clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, I'd put on it the word dreams.