60 Quotes About Adversity

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

Let God's promises shine on your problems.

Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God's most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that launch us into periods of intense spiritual growth. Once we begin to understand this, and accept it as a spiritual fact of life, adversity becomes easier to bear.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

Our faith, trust, and love are proved and revealed in adversities, that is, in difficult and grievous outward and inward circumstances, during sickness, sorrow, and privations.

Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.

Adversity is the diamond dust heaven polishes its jewels with.

Your success and happiness lie in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invisible host against difficulties.

If we cannot believe God when circumstances seem be against us, we do not believe Him at all.

Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ's sake.

You will never find Jesus so precious as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then he is like a rose blooming in the midst of the desolation, a rock rising above the storm.

Look at that beautiful butterfly, and learn from it to trust in God. One might wonder where it could live in tempestuous nights, in the whirlwind, or in the stormy day; but I have noticed it is safe and dry under the broad leaf while rivers have been flooded, and the mountain oaks torn up from their roots.

A friend cannot be known in prosperity. An enemy cannot be hidden in adversity.

Every obnoxious act is a cry for help.

Discontents are sometimes the better part of our life. I know not which is the most useful. Joy I may choose for pleasure; but adversities are the best for profit; and sometimes these do so far help me, that I should, without them, want much of the joy I have.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.

If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.

True rest is not that of torpor, but that of harmony; it is not refusing the struggle, but conquering in it; not resting from duty, but finding rest in it.

I never love those salamanders that are never well but when they are in the fire of contention. I will rather suffer a thousand wrongs than offer one. I have always found that to strive with a superior, is injurious; with an equal, doubtful; with an inferior, sordid and base; with any, full of uniqueness.

Christian, remember the goodness of God in the frost of adversity.

If you are affronted it is better to pass it by in silence, or with a jest, though with some dishonor, than to endeavor revenge. If you can keep reason above passion, that and watchfulness will be your best defenders.

If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road - abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.

I dare not exercise personal liberty if it infringes on the liberty of others.

Outward attacks and troubles rather fix than unsettle the Christian, as tempests from without only serve to root the oak faster; while an inward canker will gradually rot and decay it.

Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.

People are usually better in adversity, than prosperity. A prosperous condition is not always so safe. True, it is more pleasing to the flesh - but it is not always best. In a prosperous state, there is more burden. Many look at the shining and glittering of prosperity - but not at the burdens of prosperity.

For a hundred that can bear adversity there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

Circumstances which we have resented, situations which we have found desperately difficult, have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.

If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?

Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquility of thy life.

Opposition is not only evidence that God is blessing, but it is also an opportunity for us to grow.

The conflict will always be beyond your strength. The enemy always pushes us beyond our personal, inbred, preset limits concerning how far we will go for God. The test kills the limits of our humanity, until we are like Christ in everything. We are left with a choice: Become Christlike or gradually shrivel into superficial hypocrites: angry people who have stopped walking with God, who blame others for our bitterness.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Contention is like fire, for both burn so long as there is any exhaustible matter to contend within. Only herein it transcends fire, for fire begets not matter, but consumes it; debates beget matter, but consume it not.

Bumps are the things we climb on.

When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.

He that has never known adversity but half acquainted with others or himself.

Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.

And it is through conflict that God induces the believer to seek and to grasp total triumph in Christ.

Pressure on the outside should make us bigger on the inside.

For a Christian to defy adversities is to "despise" chastisement. Instead of hardening himself to endure stoically, there should be a melting of the heart.

Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.

For these attacks do not contribute to make us frail but rather show us to be what we are.

True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation.

Jesus' life was a storm of controversy. The apostles, like the prophets before them, could hardly go a day without controversy. Paul said that he debated daily in the marketplace. To avoid controversy is to avoid Christ. We can have peace, but it is a servile and carnal peace where truth is slain in the streets.

It is precisely this kind of anti-Christian religious litmus test that many Americans find deeply offensive. Our nation is founded on Judeo-Christian principles which have made it one of the freest nations in the world.

Luther was guilty of two great crimes - he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you're serving in the wrong place.

Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.