Quotes about Challenges

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints - all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. . . . I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet. . . . I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.

Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

In other words, what matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.

Show me someone who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her way through or around these challenges, and I'll show you the supreme power of choice. Hopelessness.