we forget that there is no victory without a battle, no testimony without a test and no miracle without an impossible circumstance.

I have always grown from my problems and challenges, from the things that don't work out, that's when I've really learned.

Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome trying to succeed.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.

I feel like the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. To the man who asked how he liked it he said: 'If it wasn't for the honour of the thing, I'd rather walk.'

Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... You can only see one thing clearly, and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.

He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.

Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him