Ken Burns Quotes

Diamonds are created through the pressures of earth and then have to go through a million dirty roads to get to the cutter who turns it into a beautiful massage. And that's like human beings. They go through a lot to be who they are in front of you.

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.

What you come to discover is, it isn't how you get there, it's that you get there. If that's what it took to get me where I'm at today, so be it.

The lotus comes from the murkiest water but grows into the purest thing.

The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.

There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.

Sometimes when really terrible things happen, something beautiful emerges out of it.

I think there can always be beauty in struggle.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

The most extraordinary thing about the oyster is this. Irritations set into his shell. He does not like them. But when he cannot get ride of them, he uses the irritation to do the loveliest thing an oyster ever has a chance to do. If there are irritations in our lives today, there is only one prescription: make a pearl. It may have to be a pearl of patience, but anyhow, make a pearl. And it takes faith and I love to do it.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?

Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.' 'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.

The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower.

Everything stinks till it’s finished.

My role in life is that of the grain of sand to the oyster-it irritates the oyster and out comes a pearl.

Adversity is like the period of the rain. . . cold, comfortless, unfriendly to people and to animals; yet from that season have their birth the flower, the fruit, the date, the rose and the pomegranate.

Beauty that arose out of pain.

There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.

Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.

Change is the nature of life but challenge is the future of life. So challenge the changes. Never change the challenges.

Life is about change, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's beautiful, but most of the time it's both.

We can never be like lillies in the garden unless we have spent time as bulbs in the dark, totally ignored.

Whatever crisis you are going through, fruit will come from it. Allow the crisis to bring fruit.

Patience, piety, and salutary knowledge spring up and ripen under the harrow of affliction; before there is wine or oil, the grape must be trodden and the oil pressed.