Orison Swett Marden Quotes

Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men and rocks all of them to manhood.

I can go back to poverty if a situation comes. I have sailed through the worst days of my life, and I am prepared for any crisis.

We had nothing, no money, when I was young. We lived in a council house. My dad struggled; my mum struggled. But that made me what I am. If I had everything on a plate from the start, maybe I would not have been a champion for 11 years.

I grew up poor. The fact that I had to struggle to succeed, that wasn't a big deal to me. I'd struggled my whole life.

I know what hard times are like. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I've had struggles.

I haven't met anybody who hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there's no way to sort of get around that.

I came from abject poverty. There was nowhere to go but up.

The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.

I came up from a difficult background.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.

When I started out, I struggled, and I was broke a lot. But I'm glad I struggled, and I'm glad I was broke a lot.

I grew up below the poverty line; I didn't have as much as other people did. I think it made me stronger as a person, it built my character. Now I have a 4.0 grade point average and I want to go to college, and just become a better person.

As you know, I'm a black girl out of the projects of New York City, raised in a single parent home because my parents divorced very very young... welfare and homeless at four and then again at 16 and just not having the things or the necessary tools that society would say I needed to have in order to be any kind of success in life.

The greatest and best of our race have necessarily been nurtured in the bracing school of poverty—the only school capable of producing the supremely great.

To the stars through thorns.

You cannot understand a man’s work by what he has accomplished but by what he has overcome in accomplishing it.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

My mother really struggled when we were young. She was on food stamps and welfare. Looking back, I know we didn't have a lot, but I never felt I was at a loss for anything.

I grew up with nothing, and that was my motivation.

You have to go through some adversity to be able to be successful.

Thanks to my mother, I graduated. But then we lost everything, we were homeless.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it's unlikely it would be worth the journey. Persist.

The fight to make ends meet, keeps a man upon his feet.

Life is a challenge, we must take it.