For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph. Thomas Mann
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. Nelson Mandela
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. Virginia Woolf