Three thousand years ago psalmist King David lamented: "My strength fails me and the light of my eyes is gone from me . . . I am ready to fall, and my pain is ever with me."
Like King David, none of us escape adversity in this life - some more, some less, but rich or poor, we are all subject to the pain that life inevitably brings to us. It is, in fact, adversity that can make us stronger, more resilient, more able to face new, perhaps even more devastating, struggles.Many philosophers, who have reasoned for themselves throughout the ages the relationship between man and adversity, and adversity's ability to strengthen men, give hope in their reflections, as in the following:
- "Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor." - Alex Carrel
- "Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit." - Bern Williams
- "So long as a man is capable of self-renewal, he is a living being." - Henri-Frederic
- "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it" - Helen Keller
- "One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment." - Merle Shain
- "Love can achieve unexpected majesty in the rock soil of misfortune." - Tony Snow
- "A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind." - John Neal
- "He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity." - Ben Johnson
- "It is an all-too-human frailty to suppose that a favorable wind will blow forever." - Rick Bode
- "We have no right to ask when sorrow comes, `Why did this happen to me?,' unless we ask the same question for every joy that comes our way." - Philip S. Bernstein
- "Archbishop Terrace Cardinal Cooke, while terminally ill with leukemia, reflected that the `gift of life,' God's special gift, is no less beautiful when it is accompanied by illness or weakness, hunger or poverty, mental or physical handicaps, loneliness or old age. Indeed, at these times, human life gains extra splendor as it requires our special care, concern and reverence."
- "We can only experience life through struggle. It provides the canvas for our life's paintings. Without it we would have brushes and paints, but no artwork, no place for our creation to exist. Struggle provides the background and the arena in which life is played out and lived." - John C.
Friel and Linda Friel
- "No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn." - Hal Borland
- "There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see." - Malcolm Muggeridge
- "The darkest hour has only 60 minutes." - Morris Mandel
- "The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover." - Marie Louise de la Ramec
- "In prosperity men ask too little of God. In adversity, too much." - Ivan Panin
- "Truly one learns only by sorrow; it is a terrible education the soul gets, and it requires a terrible grief that shakes the very foundation of one's being to bring the soul into its own." - British officer
- "When we take chairlifts high in the Alps to see the scenery, we gaze down from dizzying heights and see some of the most beautiful flowers found anywhere. It's hard to believe that just a few weeks before, these flowers were buried under many feet of snow. The bur-dens of ice and winter storms have added to their luster and growth.
"As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations." - F.W.
Robertson
- "Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has. Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, and the most gripping stories.
"The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned pricks most deeply and draws more blood." - Maya Angelou
- "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." - Albert Camus
- "No one can really pull you up very high - you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains." - Louis I. Brandeis
- "Mishaps are like knives that either serve us or cut us as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." - James Russell Lowell
- "O to be self-balanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as trees and animals do." - Walt Whitman
- "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." - Anne Frank
- "It never occurred to me to question God's doings or lack of doings while I was an inmate of Auschwitz, although of course I understand others did . . . I was no less or no more religious because of what the Nazis did to us; and I believe my faith in God was not undermined in the least. It never occurred to me to associate the calamity we were experiencing with God, to blame him, or to believe in him less or cease believing in Him at all because He didn't come to our aid.
"God doesn't owe us that, or anything. We owe our lives to Him. If someone believes God is responsible for the death of 6 million because he didn't somehow do something to save them, he's got his thinking reversed. We owe God our lives for the few or many years we live, and we have the duty to worship him and do as he commands us. That's what we're here on earth for, to be in God's service, to do God's bidding." - a survivor of Auschwitz
- "Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory." - John Steinbeck
- "The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection.
"Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." - Thomas Paine
- "Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out. When the great oak is straining in the wind, the boughs drink in new beauty, and the trunk sends down a deeper root on the windward side. Only the soul that knows the mighty grief can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy." - Edwin Markham
- "We are all pilgrims, beings in process. Each of us must march bravely to a personal drummer, climb our personal mountains, struggle for a destiny that is ours alone. Sometimes it seems much safer just to follow the good old beaten path. The `road less traveled' always seems so risky. But there is not `one road for all.' We are each gifted with an enormous but unique potential. However, in our rendezvous with destiny, we have to take chances, run risks, get rejected and be hurt, be knocked down and get back up on our feet. We must learn to survive defeats. It is all so wild, so terrifying, so adventuresome." - Father John Powell.