Robert Bly Quotes

Hardships can harden even the best person.

In life, you'll have your back up against the wall many times. You might as well get used to it.

You only really discover the strength of your spine when your back is against the wall.

There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting. It just seems like that element of trying to move forward while things are breaking down... Obviously, it's always been the backdrop for a lot of great literature and great cinematic characters, but aside from that, I'm just drawn to it because that feels honest to me.

Light sufferings give us leisure to complain.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

Great hearts can only be made by great troubles. The spade of trouble digs the reservoir of comfort deeper, and makes more room for consolation.

Throughout my life, I have always lived with adversity and will continue to have faith and do good for my family, friends and fans.

Little losses amaze, great tame.

We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know-when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

Dealing with adversity is like preparing for surgery. By putting our faith in what the doctor has said, we believe we will be better off if we have the surgery. But that does not make it any less painful. By submitting to the hand of a surgeon, we are saying that our ultimate goal is health, even at the cost of pain. Adversity is the same way. It is a means to an end. It is God's tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives.

Well, the first days are the hardest days, don't you worry anymore. When life looks like Easy Street there is danger at your door.

Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do teh best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.

If anybody says they get used to it, you don't.

I can deal with adversity.

What we look upon as our greatest unhappiness in a difficulty we are involved in, may possibly be the evil hastening to its crisis, and happy days may ensue.

When you think life is tough, it can get a lot tougher.

If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.

Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it - likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.

There is no sense in the struggle, but there is no choice but to struggle.

Bad things are like waves. They're going to happen to you, and there's nothing you can do about it. They're part of life, like waves are a part of the ocean. If you're standing on the shoreline, you don't know when the waves are coming. But they'll come. You gotta make sure you get back to the surface, after every wave. That's all.