If you think your lot in life has been hard read "Up From Slavery" by Booker T. Washington, and you may see how fortunate you have been.

It's nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning - what's the impact you're having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing.

You have to have a patience for exercise. You have to have a patience for college. You have to have a patience for relationships. Once the momentum gets going it takes on a life all of its own.

There's nothing like suffering to reveal how small and needy you are. Pain has the remarkable capacity to reveal the weakness of the things you're leaning on to make life worth living.

When you understand that life is a test, you realize that nothing is insignificant in your life.

Who has not seen a frail, clinging-vine type of woman, who upon the death of her husband strainghtens up and becomes an oak, around which the growing children twine their lives, and are forever greatful for such a mother? But this strength would never have come out and developed had it not been for the tears that watered the vine and made it into an oak.

Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.

Hang by your thumbs, everybody! Write if you get work!

If we don't face and overcome unsettling events in life, we are ruled by them.

Feed him [Micajah] with bread of affliction, and with water of affliction, until I come in peace.