Adversity and Setbacks
All 3 topics28 cues
Cues
Showing 20 of 28 cues
“Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths ... Dig deeply. You possess strengths you might not realize you have. Find the right one. Use it.”
“I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again ... I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them, I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.”
Life as a game of dice
The conditions of our existence at any moment are like dice already thrown: the roll cannot be changed and must be accepted, while how skillfully we play the dice after they fall is entirely up to us.
The Stoic archer and preferred indifferents
Like an archer who controls his training, aim and release but not the wind or target once the arrow leaves the bow, we control our health and work habits but not genes, illness or outcomes; health and wealth are preferred indifferents, but worth lies in what we do with the situation.
“There is a certain extra gain in having conquered [inner] territory entirely through one’s own initiative, courage, and perseverance.”
“To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
“Always to seek to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to believe that nothing except our thoughts is wholly under our control, so that after we have done our best in external matters, what remains to be done is absolutely impossible, at least as far as we are concerned.”
“Excellence withers without an adversary. It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
“Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own ...”
“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world ... The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma ... I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children ... these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.”
“Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people ... and ask yourself whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and eternal resistance ... do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.”
“You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.”
“The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.”
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
“From such abysses [of suffering] one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin ... with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses ... more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”
“I don't add to my troubles.”
Donald L. Hollowell: smart perseverance under injustice
Civil-rights attorney Donald Hollowell fought uphill across segregated Georgia day after day, winning the desegregation of the University of Georgia and freeing Martin Luther King Jr. while enduring hostile courts and constant danger without losing his composure: 'you can't get angry; you have to get smart.