Adversity and Success Quotes

Adversity builds muscle. Adversity creates strength. Adversity, it turns out, is preparation for success.

I refuse to let adversity allow me to be average.

I think the two most difficult things to deal with in life are failure and success

Great necessity elevates man, petty necessity casts him down

Yes great people are always subject to persecution and always getting into straits.

A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity 'til he has tasted adversity.

How can we love days that are filled with sorrow? We can't-at least not in the moment. I don't think my mother was suggesting that we suppress discouragement or deny the reality of pain. I don't think she was suggesting that we smother unpleasant truths beneath a cloak of pretended happiness. But I do believe that the way we react to adversity can be a major factor in how happy and successful we can be in life.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported with the later.

You know what they say, the high trees get the wind.

Sometimes you have to suffer a little bit in your youth to motivate yourself to succeed in later life. If Bill Gates had got laid in high school, do you think there'd be a Microsoft?

For every level there’s another Devil.

Prosperity seems to be scarcely safe, unless it be mixed with a little adversity.

It's hard dealing with wins and losses.

There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.

Adversity is prosperity to those who possess a great attitude.

The best work usually meets the strongest opposition.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity until he has tasted adversity.

I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

You can not be successful without confronting rejection.

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.