Adversity is hardship you didn’t choose. These quotes don’t pretend it isn’t real; most were written from inside it. What they share is a refusal to let it have the last word.
Some are about what’s left after a loss. Frida Kahlo, after her leg was amputated, wrote: “Feet, what do I need you for, if I have wings to fly?” J. K. Rowling, jobless and a single parent, found that “rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Beethoven, going deaf, chose “Patience for my guide.”
Some are about how to stand while it’s happening. W. E. Henley, writing from a hospital bed, says “Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” Frederick Douglass, still enslaved, describes the fight in which “a slave was made a man.”
And two ask what hardship is for. John Keats calls the world “The vale of Soul-making” and asks, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” Demetrius the Cynic goes further: “No one seems to me more unhappy than the man whom no misfortune has ever befallen.”
Read together, they treat adversity as something that can take a great deal but not everything, and that often shows people what they are made of.
No one seems to me more unhappy than the man whom no misfortune has ever befallen.
Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.
