Challenge Quotes (136) Spiritual Sayings
Summary: Definition of Challenge. A challenge is a general term referring to things that are imbued with a sense of difficulty and victory.
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Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
~ John Quincy Adams
“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”
~ Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Life is a song - sing it.
Life is a game - play it.
Life is a challenge - meet it.
Life is a dream - realize it.
Life is a sacrifice - offer it.
Life is love - enjoy it.
~ Sai Baba
was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.
~ Neale Donald Walsch
The most sacred place dwells within our heart, where dreams are born and secrets sleep, a mystical refuge of darkness and light, fear and conquest, adventure and discovery, challenge and transformation. Our heart speaks for our soul every moment while we are alive. Listen... as the whispering beat repeats: be...gin, be...gin, be...gin. It's really that simple. Just begin... again.
~ Royce Addington
It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it's the pebble in your shoe.
~ Muhammad Ali
Age doesn’t matter. Obstacles don’t matter. Winning is the challenge. Bottom line, inspiring others is the goal.
~ Glen Allison
Face new challenges, seize new opportunities, test your resources against the unknown and in the process, discover your own unique potential.
~ John Amatt
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.
~ Maya Angelou
When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.
~ Mary Kay Ash
God brings men into deep waters not to drown them, but to cleanse them.
~ Aughey
There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.
~ Richard Bach
I really do think that any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.
~ Martha Beck
Nothing is predestined. The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.
~ Ralph Blum
It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.
~ Marion Zimmer Bradley
Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time…It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.
~ Leo Buscaglia
Optimism is the foundation of courage.
~ Nicholas Murray Butler
When you feel that you have reached the end and that you cannot go one step further, when life seems to be drained of all purpose; what a wonderful opportunity to start all over again, to turn over a new page.
~ Eileen Caddy
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
~ Joseph Campbell
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
~ Joseph Campbell
Enhancing creativity is not only for enrichment; it’s a vital resource for meeting the challenges and dangers, as well as the opportunities, of the accelerated change climate of the twenty-first century.
~ Shelly Carson
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
~ M. Kathleen Casey
Crises refine life. In them you discover what you are.
~ Allen K. Chalmers
If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time or great personal growth ahead.
~ Oswald Chambers
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow by conflict.
~ William E. Channing
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
~ Charlie Chaplin
As long as we're caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we're always running from discomfort, we're going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and discomfort, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us develop inner strength. And what's especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think that we've hit the bottom, when things are at their worst.
~ Pema Chodron
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
~ Pema Chodron
When there's a disappointment, I don't know if it's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.
~ Pema Chodron
Inner silence promotes clarity of mind; It makes us value the inner world; It trains us to go inside to the source of peace and inspiration when we are faced with problems and challenges.
~ Deepak Chopra
If you're going through hell, keep going.
~ Winston Churchill
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
~ Winston Churchill
Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.
~ Tom Clancy
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably does not lead anywhere.
~ Frank A. Clark
Great opportunity is usually disguised as unsolvable problems.
~ Gretchen G. Clement
Sooner or later comes a crisis in our affairs, and how we meet it determines our future happiness and success. Since the beginning of time, every form of life has been called upon to meet such crisis.
~ Robert Collier
Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis -- once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
~ Norman Cousins
Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.
~ Stephen R. Covey
Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional.
~ Roger Crawford
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin-real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
~ Alfred D’Souza
I believe each human being has the potential to change, to transform one's own attitude, no matter how difficult the situation.
~ Dalai Lama
I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.
~ Dalai Lama
The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one’s life.
~ Dalai Lama
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
~ Jean De La Bruyere”
It was so important for me to lose everything, because I found out what the most important thing is, which is to be true to yourself.
~ Ellen DeGeneres
Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.
~ Bernadette Devlin
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
~ Isak Dinesen
Only through suffering can we find ourselves.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
~ Peter F. Drucker
Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
~ Max Eastman
Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
~ George Eliot
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
~ Henry Ford
Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off our goal.
~ Henry Ford
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
~ Viktor Frankl
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born every day, to feel a sense of self.
~ Erich Fromm
One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.
~ Robert Fulghum
Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes in the world come about. So be that person.
~ Buckminster Fuller
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
~ Buckminster Fuller
Most of my major disappointments have turned out to be blessings in disguise. So whenever anything bad does happen to me, I kind of sit back and feel, well, if I give this enough time, it’ll turn out that this was good, so I shan’t worry about it too much.
~ William Gaines
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Anything in life that we don't accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it.
~ Shakti Gawain
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
~ Kahlil Gibran
When we accept tough jobs as a challenge to our ability and wade into them with joy and enthusiasm, miracles can happen.
~ Arland Gilbert
It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation.
~ Rob Gilbert
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.
~ Seth Goden
The only real obstacle on your path to possibility will always be yourself. Too often we do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.
~ Stuart Avery Gold
May we be strengthened with the understanding that being blessed does not mean that we shall always be spared all the disappointments and difficulties of life.
~ Heber J. Grant
The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.
~ J. P. Guilford
To live is to have problems and to solve problems is to to grow intellectually.
~ J. P. Guilford
Self-initiated movement, exploration, interaction and physical experience for the joy and challenge of it, facilitates neurogenesis for a lifetime.
~ Carla Hannaford
Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.
~ Mark Victor Hansen
Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach his goals.
~ Dorothy Height
I don't have a belief problem, I have a focusing weakness. I focus on what's loudest instead of what feels best.
~ Abraham-Hicks
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
~ Napoleon Hill
Strength and courage aren't always measured in medals and victories. They are measured in the struggles they overcome. The strongest people aren't always the people who win, but the people who don't give up when they lose.
~ Ashley Hodgeson
Go on with a spirit that fears nothing.
~ Homer
It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.
~ Lena Horne
Great minds have purposes, little minds have wishes. Little minds are subdued by misfortunes, great minds rise above them.
~ Washington Irving
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.
~ Steve Jobs
Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
~ Michael Jordan
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
~ Carl Jung
Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
~ Helen Keller
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
~ Helen Keller
The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
~ Helen Keller
When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.
~ Pauline R. Kezer
Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs.
~ Tama Kieves
The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.
~ Robert Kiyosaki
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
~ Art van der Leeuw
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
~ C.S. Lewis
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
~ George Lois
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
~ Vince Lombardi
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.
~ Orison S. Marden
Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
~ Joshua J. Marine
When it rains it pours. Maybe the art of life is to convert tough times to great experiences; we can choose to hate the rain or dance in it.
~ Joan Marques
Every crisis offers you extra desired power.
~ William Moulton Marston
My will shall shape my future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man’s doing but my own. I am the force: I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice, my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.
~ Elaine Maxwell
What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.
~ Rollo May
Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough, but it’s a small price to pay for living a dream.
~ Peter McWilliams
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
~ Michelangelo
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
~ Kenji Miyazawa
Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.
~ Alfred A. Montapert
Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.
~ Mary Tyler Moore
Defeat is in your mind…resilience is in your soul.
~ Keri Murphy
Life is easier to take than you’d think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.
~ Kathleen Norris
The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
~ Arnold Palmer
If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain.
~ Dolly Parton
Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
Enthusiasm releases the drive to carry you over obstacles and adds significance to all you do.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
Even a small thorn causes pain.
~ Irish Proverb
What motivates you to change, to take action? Those who wait to take action until they find themselves in a desperate situation face more difficulties than they need to.
~ Catherine Pulsifer
You can adopt the attitude there is nothing you can do, or you can see the challenge as your call to action.
~ Catherine Pulsifer
Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.
~ Nido Qubein
Consider calling it a challenge rather than calling it a crisis.
~ Mary Anne Radmacher
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity, or our glorious uniqueness.
~ Gilda Radner
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
~ Bernice Johnson Reagon
Once you choose hope, anything's possible.
~ Christopher Reeve
Goals are a means to an end, not the ultimate purpose of our lives. They are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction. They only reason we really pursue goals is to cause ourselves to expand and grow. Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it’s who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment.
~ Anthony Robbins
Identify your problems, but give your power and energy to solutions.
~ Anthony Robbins
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
~ Mitsugi Saotome
Again and again, the impossible problem is solved when we see that the problem is only a tough decision waiting to be made.
~ Robert H. Schuller
Every burden is a blessing.
~ Robert H. Schuller
If you have a goal in life that takes a lot of energy, that requires a lot of work, that incurs a great deal of interest and that is a challenge to you, you will always look forward to waking up to see what the new day brings.
~ Susan Polis Schultz
The great news is that our brains are built for creative problem solving, and it is easy to both uncover and enhance our natural inventiveness.
~ Tina Seelig
One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.
~ Merle Shain
This, too, shall pass.
~ William Shakespeare
Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't.
~ Barbara Sher
Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
~ Samuel Smiles
There’s no thrill in easy sailing when the skies are clear and blue. There’s no joy in merely doing things which anyone can do. But there is some satisfaction that is mighty sweet to take, when you reach a destination that you thought you’d never make.
~ Spirella
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, never give up then, for that is just the time when the tide will turn.
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
I feel that the most important step in any major accomplishment is setting a specific goal. This enables you to keep your mind focused on your goal and off the many obstacles that will arise when you're striving to do your best.
~ Kurt Thomas
All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.
~ Eckert Tolle
The first thing I learned is when times are tough, you need to hedge your bets – you need to diversify.
~ Donald Trump
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
~ Voltaire
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
~ Voltaire
Fire destroys that which feeds it.
~ Simone Weil
What seems to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
~ Oscar Wilde
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