There’s people that tried to celebrate when I lost that got nothing to do with it. That’s not the sign of a champion.

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

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

There’s nothing I have to hide or defend. I’m gonna live my life. And there are times when people wanna try to attack me, and I don’t know why, but they will. And that’s okay.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

When I started my last business, I didn’t receive a paycheck for 13 months. The average person can’t handle that pressure.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‚defeat‘.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

I’m not going to stop having problems.

Mentally, the only players who survive in the pros are the ones able to manage all their responsibilities. Everybody struggles in different ways.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, ‚Don’t get comfortable, because we may not be here long.‘

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it’s important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.

I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

When you’re in hell, you forget how great you really are because you’re suffering and you forget the great things you’ve done.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can’t stop marching. Even when they’re turning the hoses on you, you can’t stop.

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

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

If you try to protect yourself from pain, it becomes a stone in your heart. But the more you learn to face things, the more likely that stone can become a pearl.