Hard Times quotes
642 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside hard times — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain."
"Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything."
"The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition."
"Bad things happen to good people all the time. It sucks. It's not fair but then much of life isn't fair. It's how you live that matters. It's how you deal with the bumps in the road."
"I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming."
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
"Action that is inspired from aligned thought is joyful action. Action that is offered from a place of contridicted thought is hard work that is not satisfying and does not yield good results. When you really feel like jumping into action, that is a clear sign that your vibration is pure and you are not offering contridicting thoughts to your own desire. When you are having a hard time making yourself do something, or when the action you offer does not produce the results you are seeking, it is always because you are offering thoughts in opposition to your desire."
"A lot of journalists give me a hard time about how I look, but I've never met a journalist I'd rather look like."
"If you don't like yourself, you're going to have a really hard time getting along with anyone else."
"A few minutes ago, I had a hard time getting through the lobby because of all the people. After today, that won't be happening."
"For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from."
"It took me a while and a lot of hard times to figure out my purpose, I am so happy with my life. I just want to help make other people happy too."
"If you want everything, you first have to give everything up."
"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."
"I had a lot of growing up to do. A lot of times, I learned the hard way."
"When hard times come, the greatest danger does not necessarily lie in the circumstances we face, but rather in the way we treat ourselves at the time. Nothing is more dangerous than self-hate. Nothing makes it more difficult to heal or to find the grace of peace than self-attack and the agony of self-doubt."
"In America, even the critics - which is a pity - tend to genre-ize things. They have a hard time when genres get mixed. They want to categorize things. That's why I love Wes Anderson's films and the Coen Brothers, because you don't know what you're going to get, and very often you get something that you don't expect and that's just what a genre's not supposed to do."
"When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep."
"It's hard to compare. Different times, different players. The administration four years ago did not have 9/11. I could tell you this; this particular administration was better suited to handle that than the former."
"People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."
