You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you.
When you get to the end of your rope. Tie a knot and hang on.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
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.
We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.
It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
For me giving up is way harder than trying.
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
I hate that word – “lucky.” It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes – I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me.
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
We can’t learn without pain.
There is no education like adversity.