Betty Smith Quotes

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding... and snatch an opportunity to shape character.

I'm very very happy for my hardships and misfortunes: they build character and make you a better person. Even if I think it's something you have to carry with you, it's definitely something that makes you more empathic towards other people, makes you understand people and relationships so much better.

Learning to endure times of disappointment, suffering, and sorrow is part of our on-the-job training. These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our character, and increase our compassion for others.

Every day, at home, I have the astonishing and humbling opportunity - together with my wife Sophie - to nurture empathy, compassion, self-love, and a keen sense of justice in our three kids.

We develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and obstacles.

Adversity builds character and character takes you places money can't.

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable.

It's like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.

Just as we can learn from our mistakes, we can gain character from our disappointments.

A high character might be produced, I suppose, by continued prosperity, but it has very seldom been the case. Adversity, however it may appear to be our foe, is our true friend; and, after a little acquaintance with it, we receive it as a precious thing - the prophecy of a coming joy. It should be no ambition of ours to traverse a path without a thorn or stone.

Hard times make you bitter or make you more compassionate.

We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way.

People that are brilliant and successful, we think they've just always been that way. That's not the case. Most of them have had some tough adversity in their life. It's prepared them. I've never felt like you could develop character without adversity.

Strength of character may be learned at work, but beauty of character is learned at home.

I think having children in general is always very helpful for acting.

Poverty is the schoolmaster of character.

I think everybody has ups and downs in their lives. We learn from the biggest disappointments, right? You learn how to be humble to yourself and to be humble to others.

You're not fully you until life has booted you in the behind.

Difficulty creates the opportunity for self-reflection and compassion.

As a parent, you have to figure out how to shape your kid's character. You want to have human beings who learn about good character. You have to be able to see your child with clarity, see the good side and the bad side of them, and work on the bad side and make them better so they fulfill their potential.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

Parents: instead of teaching our children to be brave boys or pretty girls, can we maybe just teach them how to be good humans?

Misery is, by her own nature, a passing phase of sorrow, one that does not linger uninvited. Her sojourns seem to be part of life's required curriculum, perhaps because Misery endows us with compassion and empathy.

I tell my daughter every morning, 'Now, what are the two most important parts of you?' And she says, 'My head and my heart.' Because that's what I've learned in the foxhole: What gets you through life is strength of character and strength of spirit and love.

I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.