If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost.

What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination.

In those early days, God gave us wonderful experiences to confirm our faith, then sooner or later, He chose a more difficult curriculum for us. Struggles, disappointments, and misunderstandings about the nature of the Christian life threatened our fledgling faith, but the winter season provided the opportunity to go deeper and grow closer to God.

Problems—God's method of revealing himself to anyone who is interested.

I praise all of god's creations. It can't be that one part is perfect and the other part diseased. We are pained by knowing that we have sinned. That pain was given to us to show where we have lost love. If we listen to our own pain, we will find a way through to love once more. Sin is repaid by bliss. - Julian of Norwich

You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That's a part of it.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.

Statesmanship is developed in the hard knocks of general experience, private and public.

Thank God for the tough times. They are the reason you are there - to be the leader. If everything was going well, the people wouldn't need you!

No one ever has the resources they need.

Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it.