Marlo Thomas Quotes

Life is not linear; you have ups and downs. It's how you deal with the troughs that defines you.

Everyone has their story. Everyone has issues. You have to face your fears.

When I'm really stressed out, I go to church. I light candles and sit and pray. And I'll ask myself, What's the lesson? Why am I going through this? There's got to be a reason I'm here. What am I supposed to learn?

Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work, and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.

Everything that has happened to me in my life has defined who I am, and all of the things leading up to being governor, that all came from overcoming challenges in childhood and overcoming challenges as I got older. When you have God, you quickly understand there's nothing you can't overcome.

The struggle through the grief was a huge growing process for me. There were gifts that came from it. I learned a lot about myself. I got into a mode very much like my father's own mode of seeking - seeking solutions, seeking teachers, seeking information - to try to alleviate my own suffering.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold of God's willingness.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I'm on course, and I'm doing what God wants me to do. I'm real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.

When you face the perils of weariness, carelessness, and confusion, don't pray for an easier life. Pray instead to be a stronger man or woman of God.

I feel like it's always about embracing what it is that you think is wrong with you. It's often times your greatest 'flaw' which actually forays into what is also your greatest strength.

Challenges, when you're in a tumultuous situation, are an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to get closer to God, an opportunity to find and kind of reform yourself, and to figure out what really matters and what your priorities are.

You can have financial strength, professional strength, emotional strength but for me without spiritual strength none of the rest of it matters.

The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it.

I'm not this callous clown walking around laughing at life all the time. I've had some serious, serious problems in my life. But I've come out with a smile.

You take your problems to a god, but what you really need is for the god to take you to the inside of you.

All lives have triumphs and tragedies, laughter and tears, and mine has been no different. What really matters is whether, after all of that, you remain strong and a comfort to your loved ones. I have tried to meet that test.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

You cannot escape anxiety … but I have faith that you will rise above your fears.

Many people pray to be kept out of unexpected problems. Some people pray to be able to confront and overcome them.

When I pray, I ask for guidance in my life to be the best person I can be, to learn what I need to learn, and to grow from what I learn.

I know that life is really finding the right relationship between yourself and God.

I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.

Have you not learned that strength comes to an ordinary soul when given an extraordinary calling?

Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.