Orison Swett Marden Quotes

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.\

Any personal crisis - you have to use it to get stronger.

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Sometimes the future that you imagined to be the most dreadful, turns out to be the future that compels you to reach down very deeply into your being to uncover reservoirs of strength and perserverance that you had no idea were there.

There is strength deep bedded in our hearts, of which we reck but little till the shafts of heaven have pierced its fragile dwelling. Must not earth be rent before her gems are found?

It is seldom that we find out how great are our resources until we are thrown upon them.

Remember,too,that all who succeed in life get off to a bad start,and pass through many heartbreaking struggles before they "arrive". The turning point in the lives of those who succeed usually comes at some moment of crisis,through which they are introduced to their "other selves".

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.

Often it was the most unlikely people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best.

I have learned that a bitter experience can make you stronger. I now boastfully say that I have a hide like a rhinoceros... and I'm smiling. It's an interesting thing.

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.

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.

Don't let your wounds make you become someone you're not.

I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.

Seeds of faith are always within us; sometimes it takes a crisis to nourish and encourage their growth.

It's amazing what you'll discover if you start exploring what God has placed within you.

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

Everything's the same; I'm living with cancer and it's not going to stop me. But until you really test yourself and challenge yourself, I don't think you quite know.

I'm still me even after all that's happened.

What is hard to remember when you're in the middle of it is that when you get through to the other side, you always walk away with a gift. If you can stand in there and not walk away from it, you get transformed by it.

Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.

What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.