Adversity Quotes

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

Leighton

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

Proverbs 1717 Bible

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Socrates

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

Anne Bradstreet

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.

Sir Francis Bacon

A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, We bid be quiet when we hear it cry But were we burdened with like weight of pain, As much or more we should ourselves complain.

William Shakespeare

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.

Francis Bacon

Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.

Plutarch

Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue.

Sir Francis Bacon, Of Adversity

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.

Henry Fielding

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Samuel Johnson

Adversity is the touchstone of friendship.

French Prove

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

Horace

To see a man fearless in dangers. untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.

Seneca

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

In prosperity prepare for a change; in adversity hope for one.

James Burgh

In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.

John Churton Collins

In adversity remember to keep an even mind.

Horace, Odes

Adversity cause some men to break others to break records.

William A. Ward

Be more prompt to go to a friend in adversity than in prosperity.

Chilo

In prosperity our friends know us in adversity we know our friends.

Churton Collins

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

George Washington

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

Henry Fielding

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.

Plutarch

Prosperity is a great teacher adversity a greater.

William Hazlitt

One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.

Albert Schweitze

Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity.

Napoleon Hill

Adversity is the first path to truth.

George Gordon Byron

In times of prosperity friends will be plenty, in times of adversity not one in twenty.

English Prove

Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring.

Chinese Prove

Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.

Napolean Hill

We become wiser by adversity prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Adversity does teach who your real friends are.

Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999

Adversity makes men wise but not rich.

John Ray

Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, control youth, and delights old age.

Firmianus Lactantius

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself - Always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr.

Fire is the test of gold adversity, of strong men.

Seneca