Challenges & Adversity: Tough Times Quotes

Explore a focused collection of quotes that speak to hardship, resilience, and the quiet strength found in difficult moments. These lines offer calm perspective, steady encouragement, and practical clarity when challenges feel heavy. Use them to regain balance, spark determination, and remember that progress often begins in small, durable steps. From endurance to renewal, each quote highlights the courage to keep going and the wisdom to grow through adversity.

Similar topics:Failure Hope Overcoming Obstacles Resilience Stress

"The way of life is not as easy as some people think... like me"

Mattie Stepanek, Poet

Mattie Stepanek

"In order to realize the worth of the anchor we need to feel the stress of the storm"

Corrie Ten Boom, Celebrity

Corrie Ten Boom

"I come from Detroit where it's rough and I'm not a smooth talker"

Eminem, Musician

Eminem

"My life is a struggle"

Voltaire, Writer

Voltaire

"There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything"

Tom Hanks, Actor

Tom Hanks

"I always wished for this, but it's almost turning into more of a nightmare than a dream"

Eminem, Musician

Eminem

"The knock-out punch is always the one you never see coming"

Aimee Mann, Musician

"Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed"

Peter S. Beagle, Author

"If there were a major earthquake in Los Angeles, with bridges and highways and railroads and airports all shut down and huge buildings collapsing, I don't care how much planning you do, the first 72 hours is going to be chaotic"

Warren Rudman, Politician

"My life has never been easy. It's like all the major events of my life have always been difficult"

Florence Henderson, Actress

Florence Henderson

"When trouble ends even troubles please"

Sophocles, Author

Sophocles

"Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers"

Victor Hugo, Author

Victor Hugo

"Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air"

Friedrich Schiller, Dramatist

Friedrich Schiller

"These are the times that try men's souls"

Thomas Paine, Writer

Thomas Paine

"They have vilified me, they have crucified me; yes, they have even criticized me"

Richard J. Daley, Politician

Richard J. Daley

"I just put myself in a hotel and was smoking coke for a while. Then I met up with the wrong people. I ended up getting in a hassle. I had to call the police and get myself arrested or get attacked, ripped off and got to jail. So I called the cops on them and myself"

Marc Wallice, Actor

Marc Wallice

"Basically, I was pretty ostracized in my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks- and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves"

Bruce Springsteen, Musician

Bruce Springsteen

"Those who will bear much, shall have much to bear"

Samuel Richardson, Novelist

Samuel Richardson

"I certainly wouldn't say that my life is a disaster, but there have been moments where I've felt like that"

Duncan Sheik, Musician

"And still the time, especially in the economy, is very tough, very difficult. It's necessary to be active still, to work, to fight, to make our economy more competitive"

Aleksander Kwasniewski, Politician

"Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I had better news for you but we are facing a storm that most of us have feared. This is a threat that we've never faced before"

Ray Nagin, Politician

"It is during difficult times like this that the true American spirit reveals itself. I am not talking only of the response of local, state, and federal governments, although they will each play an extremely important role in this effort"

Jo Bonner, Politician

"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold"

John Leonard, Poet

"Life is supposed to get tough"

Kelsey Grammer, Actor

"The calls that I have received from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the fact that there are other people that are suffering every bit as much as I am, and that our whole nation is going through a tragedy together, I think we have to think about those things"

Ted Olson, Politician

"Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail"

Edouard Manet, Artist

"How sweet for those faring badly to forget their misfortunes even for a short time"

Sophocles, Author

Sophocles

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions"

William Shakespeare, Dramatist

William Shakespeare

"Our pleasures were simple - they included survival"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come"

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself"

Samuel Johnson, Author

Samuel Johnson

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph"

Virginia Woolf, Author

Virginia Woolf

"Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another"

Richard M. Nixon, President

Richard M. Nixon

"It could become much worse"

Thomas Mann, Writer

Thomas Mann

"Alas, I emerge from one disaster to fall into a worse"

Pierre Corneille, Dramatist

Pierre Corneille

"Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then"

John Wooden, Coach

John Wooden

"Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them"

Horace Mann, Educator

Horace Mann

"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets"

Rudyard Kipling, Writer

Rudyard Kipling

"Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity"

Coco Chanel, Designer

Coco Chanel

"I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive"

Tyler Perry, Actor

Tyler Perry

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