Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.

Life is a night spent in an uncomfortable inn.

Life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom, To shape and use.

Perseverance is not a passive submission to circumstances-it is a strong and active response to the difficult events of life.

Even when life is difficult or challenging-especially when life is difficult and challenging-the present is always an opportunity for us to learn, grow, and become better than we've ever been before.

A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference nor does he try to make a victory of it.

Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do. But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, " I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely.

For when a man of high degree meets with adversity, he feels the strangeness of his fallen state more keenly than a sufferer of long standing.

It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye.