If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
~Robert Fulghum

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
~M. Kathleen Casey

If you're going through hell, keep going.
~Winston Churchill

We have no right to ask when sorrow comes, "Why did this happen to me?" unless we ask the same question for every moment of happiness that comes our way.
~Author Unknown

A bend in the road is not the end of the road... unless you fail to make the turn.
~Author Unknown

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.
~William Shakespeare, Othello

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. ~Mother Teresa

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
~Harry Golden

We acquire the strength we have overcome.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.
~Uncle Remus

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
~Rona Barrett

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.
~Garth Brooks

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
~Garrison Keillor

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. ~Erich Fromm


I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.
~Jewish Proverb


Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
~Rose F. Kennedy


You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.
~Arthur Gordon

Acceptance says, "True, this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me."
~Catharine Marshall

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
~Simone de Beauvoir

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
~Maureen Dowd

"Good enough never is" has become the motto of this company.
~Debbi Fields

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
~Reinhold Niebuhr

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Acceptance is not submission; it is acknowledgement of the facts of a situation. Then deciding what you're going to do about it.
~Kathleen Casey Theisen

Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
~Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

You have to take it as it happens, but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.
~Old German proverb

Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
~Norman Cousins

All that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.
~Kathleen Norris

The happy and efficient people in this world are those who accept trouble as a normal detail of human life and resolve to capitalize it when it comes along.
~H. Bertram Lewis

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
~Susan Sontag

Who except the gods can live without any pain?
~Aeschylus

Misfortune comes to all men.
~Chinese proverb

The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed.
~Clarence Day

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps 'til the legend, "over steep ways to the stars," fulfills self.
~W. C. Doane

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
~Joshua L. Liebman

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
~Bible

Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is no man in this world without some manner of tribulation or anguish, though he be king or pope.
~Thomas a Kempis

Cocaine isn't habit-forming. I should know - I've been using it for years.
~Tallulah Bankhead

I used to think there was light at the end of the tunnel, but for me today the light is on a locomotive headed right for me.
~Unknown

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
~Carl Gustav Jung

To my purist trout fishing friends, bass are lowly green fish and brown fish. To me, bass are bent rods and aching arms. To my ex-wife, bass are the bewilderment of addiction.
~Jim Slinsky

I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.
~Ray Charles

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.
~Elbert Hubbard

Keeping a little ahead of conditions is one of the secrets of business, the trailer seldom goes far.
~Charles Schwab

There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.
~Alfred Hitchcock

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.
~Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
~Samuel Johnson

Nothing in the world is more haughty than a man of moderate capacity when once raised to power.
~Baron Wessenberg

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.
~Frank Lloyd Wright

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand.
~Hal Borland

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
~George Eliot

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
~Catherine Drinker Bowen

Timing and arrogance are decisive factors in the successful use of talent.
~Marya Mannes

Dick Cheney blows birds out of the sky for pleasure but he drops bombs on Iraqi children for power.
~Krodha Vakishwari

Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.
~Spencer

It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.
~Jawaharlal Nehru

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
~Alfred Adler

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another
~Sigmund Freud

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
~Steinem

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.
~Mathewes-Green

The women of this Nation still retain the liberty to control their destinies. But the signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows.
~Harry A. Blackmun

No woman has an abortion for fun.
~Smith

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
~Teresa