Tavis Smiley Quotes

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

Everything that, by the grace of the universe, I was able to become is the direct result of everything I went through.

Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today; I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here.

They say when you reach a crossroad or a turning point in life, it really doesn't matter how we got there, but it's what we do next after we got there. Usually you arrive there by adversity, and then it is then and only then that we find out who we truly are and what we're truly made of. It's a process, a gift and a journey, and if we can travel it alone, although the road may be rough at the beginning, you find an ability to walk it. A way to start fresh again. It's neither a downfall nor a failure, but a new beginning.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

I'll always push myself because that's the journey of life. We do go through things. Some of it's incredibly great and some of it's really bad.

That wonderful and terribly frightening journey of self-discovery. That process of growth, of being an independent person, of learning who you are and what you want from life, is the real secret of life, happiness and beauty.

I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.

People think my life has been tough, but I think has been a wonderful journey. The older you get, the more you realise it's not what happens, but how you deal with it.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

When you go through really hard times, you really figure out who you are, how you respond to things, and how things affect you.

People don't know the real me. The hard times I went through are what led me to my life now. I was a mess as a teen! I was kind of wild and really unhappy.

My career is a journey for me, and any journey is incomplete without the struggle.

Life is a bunch of ups and downs. It's how you handle it.

When life hits you hard, it can throw you off course. But how you handle that adversity can teach you so much about yourself and change your perspective on what you actually want from life.

It is written that adversity introduces us to ourselves.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.

It's not so much what you accomplish in life that really matters, but what you overcome that proves who you are, what you are, and whether you are a champion.

Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them.

But I do believe that's when you do your soul-searching. I think when you have these trials that life gives you, it is an opportunity to find out who you are. Not just who you are when everything's great, but who are you when everything is taken away from you and you have nothing.

Life can take so many twists and turns. You can’t ever count yourself out. Even if you’re really afraid at some point, you can’t think that there’s no room for you to grow and do something good with your life.

It's in the struggle itself that you define yourself.