All that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.
The happy and efficient people in this world are those who accept trouble as a normal detail of human life and resolve to capitalize it when it comes along.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Who except the gods can live without any pain?
Misfortune comes to all men.
The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed.
Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps 'til the legend, "over steep ways to the stars," fulfills self.
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
There is no man in this world without some manner of tribulation or anguish, though he be king or pope.
There is no armor against fate; death lays his icy hands on kings.
There is no easy path leading out of life, and few are the easy ones that lie within it.
A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.
It is arrogance to expect that life will always be music.... Harmony, like a following breeze at sea, is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost, our lot is to tack and tune.
One cannot get through life without pain. ... What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
If you have arthritis, calmly say, I was always complaining about the ruts in the road until I realized that the ruts are the road.
"Okay, I have arthritis, and this is the way arthritis is." Take pain as it comes and you can better master it.
It is right it should be so, Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Through the world we safely go.