While in the midst of a challenge or crisis, it’s often hard to take advice or see the upside of the situation. But in reality, there are several ways to perceive a struggle without labeling yourself a failure or assuming the worst case scenario. While it may be difficult to recognize, tough times can provide us with learning opportunities, clarity, and even happiness down the road. The following quotes by some of the world’s most successful people will help you reframe your perspective on tough times.

1. “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – CS Lewis

2. “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” – Maya Angelou

3. “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” – TS Eliot

4. “The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” – Moliere

5. “The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” – Randy Pausch

6. “People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.” – Emily Dickenson

7. “Affliction is a good man’s shining time.” – Edward Young

8. “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.” – Mitch Albom

9. “The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.” – Albert Einstein

10. “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” – Kenji Miyazawa

11. “Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him” – Aldous Huxley

12. “I don’t run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run towards it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot” – Nadia Comaneci

13. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin

14. “Problems are messages.” – Shakti Gawain

15. “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” – Buddha

16. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

17. “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr

18. “Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.” – Alexander Bell

19.”If you are going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill

20. “The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

21. “Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.” – Walt Whitman

22.”In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.” – Lee Iacocca

23. “History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.” – Bertie Charles Forbes

24. “It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others.” – Dalai Lama

25. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling

26. “We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we are afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

27. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

28.”If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” – Frank A. Clark

29. “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” – John Ruskin

30. “Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.” – Samuel Lover