"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."
Hard Times quotes
Hard Times
642 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Hard Times quotes (page 1 of 33)
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"New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings."
"Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts."
"You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes."
"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them."
"Sometimes, a flame can be utterly extinguished. Sometimes, a flame can shrink and waver, but sometimes a flame refuses to go out. It flares up from the faintest ember to illuminate the darkness, to burn in spite of overwhelming odds."
"God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them."
"I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives. But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are. Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake."
"Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries."
"Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever."
"Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)"
"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?"
"When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. It's hard to understand failure when you're going through it, but in the grand scheme of things it's good to fall down - not because you're drunk and not near stairs."
"I didn't have a hard time making it. I had a hard time letting it go."
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks."
"Nothing that you plan is going to work out. Everything is going to be totally different than the way you expected. And things will constantly challenge you. Wherever you look the world is not as solid it seems to be."
"If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day."
"We must never despair; our situation has been compromising before, and it has changed for the better; so I trust it will again. If difficulties arise, we must put forth new exertion and proportion our efforts to the exigencies of the times."
"We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."
"Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like."