Echoes

Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.

Accept everything just the way it is.

Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow.

It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure, and to attend uncomplainingly upon the God under whose guidance everything progresses; for it is a bad soldier who grumbles when following his commander.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

A man must shape himself to a new mark when the old one goes to ground.

Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

The quality I look for most is optimism: especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat.

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

Never despair.

It is difficulties that show what men are.