The Benefits of Problems Shouldn't Be Missed
We tend to avoid the very challenges that will give us the knowledge and strength we want.
This blog is unusual in that there is no discussion or narrative. I am moved by the quotes below, which speak for themselves.
"There is a good deal to live for, but a man has to go through hell really to find it out. The process is hard but the result pays."
- Edwin Arlington Robinson
"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
- Willa Cather
"To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist."
- Gail Sheehy
"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Wisdom comes alone through suffering."
- AESCHYLUS
"Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is."
- CHRISTIAAN BARNARD
"You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering."
- HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."
- E. H. Chapin
"There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering."
- ALBERT EINSTEIN
"Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."
- GEORGE ELIOT
"We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering."
- ERIC HOFFER
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night."
- ELIE WIESEL
"One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
- SIGMUND Freud
"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths."
- ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
"It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win."
- PHIL OCHS
"Strength only grows from struggle."
Louis L'Amour
The theologian Paul Tillich said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you that you are not the person you thought you were. They carve through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul and reveal a cavity below and then carve through that and reveal another cavity below. You just see deeper into yourself than you ever knew existed, and you realize when you see into those depths that only spiritual and emotional food will fill those voids. So you begin to live life at a deeper level.
"People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity."
- JOHN ADAMS
"If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small."
- PROVERBS 24:10
"Adversity is the first path to truth."
- GEORGE NOEL GORDON (LORD BYRON)
"He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself."
- CHARLES CALEB COLTON
"Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity."
- STEPHEN R. COVEY
"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."
- WILLIAM HAZLITT
"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."
- HORACE (1ST C. BC)
"He knows not his own strength who hath not met adversity."
- BEN JONSON
"More than anything else, what keeps a person going in the midst of adversity is having a sense of purpose."
- JOHN C. MAXWELL
"Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes."
- JOHN UPDIKE
"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
"The scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight."
-Herman Melville
In the movie Apollo 13, we watched the mission to land on the moon fall apart because of a mechanical failure, and how they exercised every brain cell of NASA to bring those men home.
During their return to earth, a reporter asked Jim Lovell, the commander, about any scary incidents he’d had in his career as a pilot. He described a time when he was flying off an aircraft career in a Banshee fighter, and when he headed back for a landing he had a hard time finding the carrier because it was in combat conditions and had no running lights. He was trying to find a carrier in the middle of a vast ocean in the dark. The possibility of death was very real.
Radar was jammed, the homing signal was gone, so he was moving away from the carrier. Suddenly all the lights in the cockpit went out because of a malfunction. Looking in the water, he saw the phosphorescent trail left by algae as they were churned up by the propellers of the carrier. He followed the trail straight to the carrier. Had his electrical system not failed, and his lights gone out, he would not have reached the safety of the carrier.
"Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their carvings."
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“Isn’t life unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Isn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it is a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?"
-Edna Ferber
"The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see."
-Adrienne Rich
“give … beauty for ashes.” (Isaiah 61:3)
"Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it."
-Joni Mitchell
"If you get rid of the demons or the disturbing things, if you get rid of them, then the angels fly off too."
-Joni Mitchell
"The greatest things in the world come from suffering. It ought to give us solace. A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle."
-Malcolm Gladwell
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it."
-Helen Keller
"The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory."
-BLAISE PASCAL
"The reward is not so great without the struggle. . . . The triumph can't be had without the struggle."
-WILMA RUDOLPH
"I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it's a field, or a home, or a country."
-THORNTON WILDER
"It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win."
-PHIL OCHS
"Success is sweet, the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats."
-A. BRONSON ALCOTT
"Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever."
-Leon Trotsky
"In a fair gale every fool may sail, but wise behavior in a storm commends the wisdom of a pilot."
-Francis Quarles
"The way to bliss lies not on beds of down, And he that had no cross deserves no crown."
-Francis Quarles
"What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is…for us humans."
-Vincent van Gogh
"In a dark time, the eye begins to see … I climb out of my fear—free—in the tearing wind."
-Theodore Roethke
I have childhood memories of a part of the world that could serve as a picture postcard for the changing seasons of the year. Each passing month was glorious and wonderful. During a perfect winter day, pristine snow blanketed the mountains and city streets. Spring brought cleansing rains and the explosion of green-dressed life. The lazy skies of summer served as a pleasant blue canvas for the blaze of a bright sun. And spectacular autumn transformed nature into brilliant shades of orange, yellow, and red. As a child, I loved each season, and to this day, I love the character and uniqueness of each one.
We have seasons in our lives as well. Some are warm and pleasant. Others are not. Some of the days in our lives are as beautiful as pictures in a calendar. And yet there are days and circumstances that cause heartache and may bring into our lives deep feelings of despair, resentment, and bitterness.
I am sure at one time or another we have all thought it would be nice to take up residence in a land filled only with days of picture-perfect seasons and avoid the unpleasant times in between.
But this is not possible. Nor is it desirable.
As I look over my own life, it is apparent that many of the times of greatest growth have come to me while passing through stormy seasons.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe fiber has passed into your body.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Life begins on the other side of despair."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Ben Franklin's observation that "things that hurt, instruct."
"Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles."
-Harry Emerson Fosdick
"The greater the obstacle, the greater the glory in overcoming it; and difficulties are but the maids of honor to set off the virtue."
-Moliere
"A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner."
-Proverb (English)
"He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles."
-Henry David Thoreau
Our challenges today are different from those of our ancestors. Many of them lived lives of poverty and hardship; some among us, however, are affluent and complacent. Wealth, abundance, and easy living do not help us develop the ability to flourish when faced with the rigors and reversals of life. Rather than seeking ease, we must plant, cultivate, and nourish within ourselves the seeds that will enable us to withstand the winds and heat of temptation and evil, and that will help us live successful, happy, and pure lives.
-Joseph B. Wirthlin
If it were possible to make your road very easy, you wouldn’t grow in strength. If you were always forgiven for every mistake without effort on your part, you would never receive the blessings of growth. If everything were done for you, you wouldn’t learn how to work, or gain self-confidence, or acquire the power to change.
-Richard G. Scott
Paul observed, “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” (Heb. 12:11.)
Otherwise, if certain mortal experiences were cut short, it would be like pulling up a flower to see how the roots are doing. Put another way, too many anxious openings of the oven door, and the cake falls instead of rising. Moreover, enforced change usually does not last, while productive enduring can ingrain permanent change.
-Neal A. Maxwell
In nature, trees that grow up in a windy environment become stronger. As winds whip around a young sapling, forces inside the tree do two things. First, they stimulate the roots to grow faster and spread farther. Second, the forces in the tree start creating cell structures that actually make the trunk and branches thicker and more flexible to the pressure of the wind. These stronger roots and branches protect the tree from winds that are sure to return. (A. Stokes, A. H. Fitter, and M. P. Coutts, “Responses of Young Trees to Wind and Shading: Effects on Root Architecture,” Journal of Experimental Botany, vol. 46, no. 290 (Sept. 1995), 1139–46.)
"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."
-William Hazlitt
Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
-Shakespeare, (As You Like It, act 2, scene 1.)
The Lord’s expression is even more explicit: “After much tribulation come the blessings.” (D&C 58:4.)
"Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist."
-Gail Sheehy
“What does not destroy me makes me stronger."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent."
-Carl Jung
"Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery."
-Katherine Mansfield
"The three pillars of learning: seeing much, suffering much, and studying much."
-Isaac D'Israeli
We learn and grow and become stronger as we face and survive the trials through which we must pass. We know that there are times when we will experience heartbreaking sorrow, when we will grieve, and when we may be tested to our limits. However, such difficulties allow us to change for the better ... and to become something different from what we were—better than we were, more understanding than we were, more empathetic than we were, with stronger convictions than we had before.
This should be our purpose—to persevere and endure, yes, but also to become more spiritually refined as we make our way through sunshine and sorrow. Were it not for challenges to overcome and problems to solve, we would remain much as we are, with little or no progress toward our goal of eternal life. The poet expressed much the same thought in these words:
Good timber does not grow with ease,
The stronger wind, the stronger trees.
The further sky, the greater length.
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.
(Douglas Malloch, “Good Timber,” in Sterling W. Sill, Making the Most of Yourself (1971), 23)
-Thomas S. Monson
In "Still Me" (1988), Christopher Reeve put it this way:
"If someone were to ask me what is the most difficult lesson
I've learned from all this, I'm very clear about it:
I know I have to give when sometimes I really want to take."
And in "Lucky Man: A Memoir" (2002), Michael J. Fox wrote that life with Parkinson's disease was a dramatic improvement over his star-studded pre-diagnosis years:
"I would never want to go back to that life--a sheltered, narrow existence fueled by fear and made livable by insulation, isolation, and self-indulgence. It was a life lived in a bubble—but bubbles, being the most fragile constructions, are easily destroyed.
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life."
-Joseph Campbell
"Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account."
-Thomas Carlyle
"If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights."
-Victor Hugo
"It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"On ruins one can begin to build...there are no obstructing walls."
-Rose Macaulay
"One knows what one has lost, but not what one may find."
-George Sand
"Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus."
-Wallace Stegner
Thornton Wilder's one-act play "An Angel That Troubled the Waters" (1928). In the play, a doctor plagued by melancholy and remorse makes frequent visits to a pool reputed to have healing powers for the first person to step into it after an angel has stirred the waters. As luck would have it, the doctor arrives just as the angel is readying the pool. When the doctor attempts to wade in, though, the angel blocks his path, explaining that the physician's very problems in living make him admirably suited to help others. The angel says:
"Without your wound, where would your power be?"
The angel then concludes with this remarkable passage:
"The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve."
"What does not destroy me makes me stronger."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929
"The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does."
-Moses Maimonides
“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
-Boris Pasternak
One young woman wrote about the lessons she has learned in her struggle to recover from an automobile accident in which she received severe head injuries.
“I didn’t know how strong I was until the spring of 1996. The incidents of one afternoon completely changed my expectations of how my education would proceed. One minute I was on a path to my future, much like every other high school student. The next minute life was no longer ordinary for me. I was on my way to strengthening myself in ways I would never have guessed. … I was on a road to relearning instead of learning. … I relearned how to eat; swallowing the food in my mouth was a hard task that I had to relearn. I went from the bed to a wheelchair to standing and walking in over a five-month period. … I have learned many great truths from my diverse trials this past year. Prayers are really answered. Fasting is a power in my family. Love has kept me alive. … I have learned what I can tolerate. … Throughout all of this I have learned that I am a lot stronger than I thought. I have learned that if you need help, it is OK to ask for it; we all have our limits, strengths, and weaknesses. … All knowledge … is ‘spendable currency’ for me. Like a baby bird broken from its shell, I am learning to fly again.”
-Elizabeth Merkley
While I was lying in my hospital bed and for several weeks at home, my physical activity was severely restricted by intense pain which disabled my weakened body, but I learned the joy of freeing my mind to ponder the meaning of life and the eternities. Since my calendar was wiped clean of meetings, tasks, and appointments, for a number of weeks I was able to turn my attention away from matters of administration to matters of the eternities. I discovered that if I dwelt only upon my pain, it inhibited the healing process. I found that pondering was a very important element in the healing process for both soul and body. Pain brings you to a humility that allows you to ponder. It is an experience I am grateful to have endured.
-Robert D. Hales
"One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night."
-Kahlil Gibran
"Weary the path that does not challenge."
-Hosea Ballou
“A blocked path also offers guidance."
-Mason Cooley
If you never felt pain, how would you feel the healing balm of the Savior’s love?
If you never had trials, how would you know what you were capable of?
If people never hated you, how would you learn forgiveness?
If you never felt sadness, how would you know the Comforter?
If you never made mistakes, how would you know forgiveness?
If you didn’t have profound questions, how would you know the guidance of inspiration?
If you didn’t get into unsolvable problems, how would you know the relief of being rescued?
If you were never broken, how would you know the joy of feeling whole?
If you never walked through fire, how would you become purified?
If you got everything you wanted, how would you learn gratitude?
If you had all power, how would you learn faith and trust?
"The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden."
-Phillips Brooks
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
-Scott Peck
"There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain."
-Aeschylus
"What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else."
-Margaret Atwood
"Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging."
-Joseph Campbell
"The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life."
-Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
"The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt."
-Max Lerner
"It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way."
-Rollo May
"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure."
-William Saroyan
"Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever."
-Leon Trotsky
What parent would say to a child, “Learning to walk is such a painful and difficult experience, you will stumble, you will most likely hurt yourself, you will cry many times when you fall. I will protect you from the struggle”? I have watched our youngest grandson, Seth, as he was learning to walk. Through this process of gaining experience, he now walks with confidence. Could I have said to him, “Out of my love for you, I will save you from this”? If so, because I could not bear to see him take a tumble at times, he may have never learned to walk. That is unthinkable for a loving parent or grandparent.
The child, if he or she is ever to walk, must pass through the stumbling and often painful process of learning. We encouraged Seth to learn through his experience. Yes, even knowing that the process would be difficult, we knew that the freedom and joy of walking would outweigh any temporary pain or adversity.
What is mortality if not a long process like learning to walk? We must learn to walk in the ways of love and joy.
-Joseph B. Wirthlin
“We have learned many things through suffering. We call it suffering. I call it a school of experience. … I have never looked at these things in any other light than trials for the purpose of purifying us as gold is purified by the fire”
-John Taylor
Psalm 12:6
And the words of the LORD are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, like gold refined seven times.
"Afflictions...make the heart more deep, more experimental, more knowing and profound; and so more able to hold, contain, and bear more."
-John Bunyan
"It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific nation, that great characters are formed...The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties."
-Abigail Adams
"Great necessities call out great virtues."
-Abigail Adams
Like the intense fire that transforms iron ore into iron and then into steel, as we remain faithful during the fiery trial of our faith, we are spiritually refined and strengthened.
-Ezra Taft Benson
"Never to suffer would never to have been blessed."
-Edgar Allan Poe
"Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson
Prospice
by Robert Browning 1812–1889
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
"It is not given to everyone to shine in adversity."
-Jane Aiken Hodge
"Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes."
-John Updike
"People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity."
-John Adams
"Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity."
-Stephen R. Covey
“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."
-Horace (1st C, BC)
"You'll never find a better sparring partner than adversity."
-Golda Meir
"We gain the strength of the temptation we resist."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
-Carl Jung
Alberto Salazar (winner of Boston Marathon and three-time winner of the New York Marathon) asked what makes a great marathoner: “The willingness and ability to suffer.”
"The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness."
-Havelock Ellis
Crisis or transition of any kind reminds us of what matters most. In the routine of life, we often take our families—our parents and children and siblings—for granted. But in times of danger and need and change, there is no question that what we care about most is our families!
-M. Russell Ballard
"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
-Carl Jung
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
-Bertrand Russell
"To be grateful for all life's blessings. . . is the best condition for a happy life. A joke, a good meal, a fine spring day, a work of art, a human personality, a voice, a glance--but this is not all. For there is another kind of gratitude. . .the feeling that makes us thankful for suffering, for the hard and heavy things of life, for the deepening of our natures which perhaps only suffering can bring."
-Thomas Mann
More skillful in self knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
-William Wordsworth, "Character of the Happy Warrior"
"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
-Willa Cather
"It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life."
-Anne Lamott
"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts."
-Richard Bach
"We only think when we are confronted with a problem."
-John Dewey
“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year."
-John Foster Dulles
"A problem is a chance for you to do your best."
-Duke Ellington
"We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."
-John W. Gardner
"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes."
-Henry J. Kaiser
"We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve."
-Maxwell Maltz
"Problems are to the mind what exercise is to the muscles; they toughen and make strong."
-Norman Vincent Peale
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem."
-Theodore Ruskin
"It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually."
-M. Scott Peck
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "We gain the strength of the temptation we resist." He might have added, "We also gain the strength of the problems we face and overcome."
"We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow."
-James Taylor
"As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed."
-Vincent Van Gogh
"What molting time is to the birds, so adversity or misfortune is to us humans."
-Vincent Van Gogh
"The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor.
If there were no difficulties there would be no success;
if there were nothing to struggle for,
there would be nothing to be achieved."
-Samuel Smiles
"The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve."
-Samuel Smiles
"It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes."
-Louis Pasteur
"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
"To be tested is good. The challenged life is the best therapist."
-Gail Sheehy
We spend much of our lives expressing irritation at those experiences which inconvenience us. When things don’t go our way, we want to know why. We want difficult experiences to go away. How foolish of us. All our lives we become so annoyed at the very experiences we need in order to gain the qualities we want to have.
Imagine that your primary goal in life is to become physical strong. What would you think of barbells scattered all over the floor of a room? Would you see them as a mess to be cleaned up, or would you regard them as an opportunity to become stronger?
Those difficult experiences are the very ones which help us to learn how to become loving toward other people. It’s those experiences which teach us patience and faith. It’s the difficult experiences which become the barbells that develop our emotional and spiritual muscles and enable us to become much stronger and happier than we could otherwise have been. And yet, when these experiences arise, we immediately wish them to go away. In fact, if possible, we demand that they go away. It’s ironic that we pay health clubs hundreds of dollars a year for the opportunity to lift physical weights, but we flee from most such opportunities in an emotional and spiritual sense.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
-Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese artist & poet in US (1883 - 1931)
"As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it."
-Horace
"True knowledge comes only through suffering."
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity till he has tasted adversity."
-Sufi Poet Sadi
"There is no education like adversity."
-Benjamin Disraeli.
"Adversity is the midwife of genius.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat."
-Anais Nin
"Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in."
-James Reston
"One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity."
-Albert Schweitzer
"Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit."
-Napoleon Hill
"Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging."
-Joseph Campbell
"I would never wish anyone a life of prosperity and security. These are bound to betray. I would wish instead for adventure, struggle, and challenge."
-Dr. Marion Hilliard
"There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain."
-Aeschylus
"The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles."
-Bernard M. Baruch
"A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities."
-Charles DeGaulle
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Young people ought to seek that experience that is going to knock them off center."
-James Michener
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
-M. Scott Peck
"To be tested is good. The challenged life is the best therapist."
-Gail Sheehy
We tend to avoid the very challenges that will give us the knowledge and strength we want.
We pray to be loving and strong, and then we diligently avoid the experiences that will help us develop those qualities.
"The triumph can't be had without the struggle."
-Wilma Rudolph
"We only think when we are confronted with a problem."
-John Dewey
"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
-Carl Jung
"A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing."
-Jessamyn West
"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
-Carl Jung
"Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty."
-Henri-Frederic Amiel
"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."
-William Ellery Channing
"The greater the obstacle, the greater the glory in overcoming it; and difficulties are but the maids of honor to set off the virtue."
-Moliere
"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize . . . my capacities."
-Jose Ortega Y Gasset
"It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes."
-Louis Pasteur
"To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
"If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved."
-Samuel Smiles
"Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties."
-C. H. Spurgeon
"The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper."
-Aristotle
"Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune;
but great minds rise above it."
Washington Irving
USA Today, February 24, 2011
Kids who grow up on farms are 30-50% less likely than others to develop asthma. “It’s the germs.” The “good germs” from cows, pigs, and other animals. Farm household dust has the highest variety of bacteria and fungi. 933 European children studied in New England Journal of Medicine, study released today. Overall asthma rates have doubled in the past 30 years. one in 10 U.S. children has asthma, says CDC. Good germs might “educate” the immune system. Dirty, roach-infested homes, however, have more asthma.
"It is the depth of the crisis that empowers hope. The power of turning, that radically changes the situation, never reveals itself outside of crisis."
-Martin Buber
"When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is easy enough to be pleasant
When life flows by like a song,
But the man worth while is the one who will smile
When everything goes dead wrong."
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I'll show you someone who has overcome adversity."
-Lou Holtz
"He knows not his own strength who hath not met adversity."
-Ben Jonson
"To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place."
-Ursula K. Le Guin
