Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.
We always have the necessary resources to face the storms that life throws at us, but most of the time,those resources are locked up in the depths of our heart and we waste an enormous amount of time trying to find them.By the time we've found them,we already been defeated by adversity.
I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget... we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat... All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness... We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that... Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.
We fail to see the purifying and refining effect wrought by the flames of adversity. These flames are not meant to consume but only to purify us. Disguised as adversity, blessings are showered upon us.
The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.
Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.