There is no more searching test of the human spirit than the way it behaves when fortune is adverse and it has to pass through a prolonged period of disappointing failures. Then comes the real proof of the man. Achievement, if a man has the ability, is a joy; but to take hard knocks and come up smiling, to have your mainsail blown away and then rig a sheet on the bowsprit and sail on -- this is perhaps the deepest test of character.
(Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts, found Flowers Along The Path by Esther Carls Dodgen, p. 211)
17 December 2015
