Our hardest seasons can become quiet teachers. With steady steps and a patient heart, we find new strength. As Isak Dinesen encouraged: “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

“When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.” ~ St. Francis de Sales

“It is almost as difficult to keep a first-class person in a fourth-class job, as it is to keep a fourth-class person in a first-class job.” ~ Paul H. Dunn

“Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.” ~ Winston Churchill

“The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles, are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.” ~ William Matthews

“Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.” ~ E. W. Howe

“If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.” ~ Dan Rather

“There are two ways of meeting difficulties. You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them.” ~ Phyllis Bottome

“It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes.” ~ Louis Kossuth

“Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.” ~ Carl Jung

“You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.” ~ Jane Addams

“Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” ~ Theodore N. Vail

“Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.” ~ Colum McCann

“The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one’s life.” ~ Dalai Lama, Kindness, Clarity, & Insight