Difficulties and obstacles are God's challenges to faith. When hindrances confront us in the path of duty, we are to recognize them as vessels for faith to fill with the fullness and all-sufficiency of Jesus.
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
One of the things I learned as president is that your life is just not going to unfold the way you want it to. There will be surprises, challenges, and therefore the question is how you deal with the unexpected.
It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.
Whenever I look at the history of presidents I deeply admire - the one thing that I'm always struck by is persistence. It's a quality that's underrated. Being able to plough through, being able to stay buoyant in the face of challenges.