Quotes from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Success is determined not by whether or not you face obstacles, but by your reaction to them. And if you look at these obstacles as a containing fence, they become your excuse for failure. If you look at them as a hurdle, each one strengthens you for the next.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Successful people don't have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“To THINK BIG and to use our talents doesn't mean we won't have difficulties along the way. We will--we all do. If we choose to see the obstacles in our path as barriers, we stop trying. "We can't win," we moan. "They won't let us win.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“...I became acutely aware of an unusual ability--a divine gift, I believe--of extraordinary eye and hand coordination. It’s my belief that God gives us all gifts, special abilities that we have the privilege of developing to help us serve Him and humanity. And the gift of eye and hand coordination has been an invaluable asset in surgery. This gift goes beyond eye-hand coordination, encompassing the ability to understand physical relationships, to think in three dimensions. Good surgeons must understand the consequences of each action, for they’re often not able to see what’s happening to see on the other side of the area in which the area they’re actually working.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“I'm a good neurosugeon. That's not a boast but a way of acknowledging the innate ability God has given to me. Beginning with determination and using my gifted hands, I went on for training and sharpening for my skills. ”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Do what you have to do so that you can be what you want to be”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“I came to realize that if people could make me angry they could could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life?”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“It's not what you do but that kind of job you do that makes the difference.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“if you can read, honey, you can learn just about anything you want to know. The doors of the world are open to people who can read. And”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“One reason I didn’t hold any grudges or harsh feelings toward Dad must have been that my mother seldom blamed him—at least not to us or in our hearing. I can hardly think of a time when she spoke against him.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“No one ever said, “This isn’t the way normal people live.” Again, I think it was the sense of family unity, strengthened by the Averys, that kept me from being too concerned about the quality of our life in Boston.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (RSV).”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“The culture in which we live stresses looking out for number one. Without adopting such a self-centered value system, we can demand the best of ourselves while we are extending our hands to help others.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“close the wounds, and the 22-hour surgical ordeal was over. The Siamese”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“being a member of a minority race doesn’t mean being a minority achiever.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Abraham Lincoln once said, “All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my mother.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“No knowledge is ever wasted. To quote the apostle Paul: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“70,000 to 100,000 births; twins joined at the head occur only once in 2 to 2.5 million births. Siamese twins received their name because of the birthplace (Siam) of Chang and Eng (1811 - 1874) whom P.T. Barnum exhibited across America and Europe. Most cranio pagus Siamese twins die at birth or shortly afterward. So far as we know, not more than 50 attempts had previously been made to separate such twins. Of those, less than ten operations have resulted in two fully normal children. Aside from the skill of the operating surgeons, the success depends largely on how much and what kind of tissue the babies share. Occipital cranio pugus twins (such as the Binders) had never before been separated with both surviving.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Successful people don’t have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“when the Vietnamese came to the United States they often faced prejudice from everyone—White, Black, and Hispanics. But they didn’t beg for handouts and often took the lowest jobs offered. Even well-educated individuals didn’t mind sweeping floors if it was a paying job. Today many of these same Vietnamese are property owners and entrepreneurs. That’s the message I try to get across to the young people. The same opportunities are there, but we can’t start out as vice president of the company. Even if we landed such a position, it wouldn’t do us any good anyway because we wouldn’t know how to do our work. It’s better to start where we can fit in and then work our way up.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“I can tolerate amazing amounts of stress and ridicule. By God’s grace, it still doesn’t require any effort to shake off unpleasant, irritating things. God has helped me to conquer my terrible temper, once and forever. During those hours in the bathroom I also came to realize that if people could make me angry they could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life? Over the years I’ve chuckled at people who deliberately did things they thought would make me angry. I’m no better than anyone else, but I laugh inside at how foolish people can be, trying to make me angry.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“God has an overall plan for people’s lives and the details get worked out along the way, even though we usually have no idea what’s going on.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“sure. I know I hated it when a resident disregarded a”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“Craig is not yours that you should demand to keep him. He doesn’t belong to you, Susan. He is mine.”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“I sank down on the toilet, sharp mental pictures of other temper fits filling my mind. I saw my anger, clenched my fists against my rage. I wouldn’t be any good for anything if I couldn’t change. My poor mother, I thought. She believes in me. Not even she knows how bad I am. Misery engulfed me in darkness. “If you don’t do this for me, God, I’ve got no place else to go.” At one point I’d slipped out of the bathroom long enough to grab a Bible. Now I opened it and”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“go on hating myself forever for all the terrible things I’d done. I sank down on the toilet, sharp mental pictures of other temper fits filling my mind. I saw my anger, clenched my fists against my rage. I wouldn’t be any good for anything if I couldn’t change. My poor mother, I thought. She believes in me. Not even she knows how bad I am. Misery engulfed me in darkness. “If you don’t do this for me, God, I’ve got no place else to go.” At one point I’d slipped out of the bathroom long enough to grab a Bible. Now I opened it and began”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“began to read in Proverbs. Immediately I saw a string of verses about angry people and how they get themselves into trouble. Proverbs 16:32 impressed me the most: “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (RSV). My lips moved wordlessly as I continued to read. I felt as though the verses had been written just to me, for me. The words of Proverbs condemned me, but they also gave me hope. After a while peace begin to fill my mind. My hands stopped shaking. The tears stopped. During those hours alone in the bathroom,”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

“something happened to me. God heard my deep cries of anguish. A feeling of lightness flowed over me, and I knew a change of heart had taken place. I felt different. I was different. At last I stood up, placed the Bible on the edge of the tub, and went to the sink. I washed my face and hands, straightened my clothes. I walked out of the bathroom a changed young man. “My temper will never control me again,” I told myself. “Never again. I’m free.” And since that day, since those long hours wrestling with myself and crying to God for help, I have never had a problem with my temper. That”
― Ben Carson, quote from Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

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Popular quotes

“No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

"Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;
3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write).

"But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“I feel that if I’m going through this hellish decline, you should be going through one also . . . misery loves company, and I guess we’ve all got a streak of one hundred percent gold-plated bastard in our natures, tangled up so tightly with the good part of us that we can never get free of it.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from Thinner

“His name is Julian Janus Marquet, but I’m going to call him Jory.”

Both Chris and Paul heard my thin whisper. I was so tired, so sleepy.

“Why would you call him Jory?” asked Paul, but it wasn’t me who had the strength to answer. It was Chris who understood my reasoning.

“If he had been blond, she would have named him Cory—but the J will stand for Julian, and the rest for Cory.”

Our eyes met and I smiled.

How wonderful to be understood, and never have to explain.”
― V.C. Andrews, quote from Petals on the Wind

“It was true; it was somehow not even a surprise, more like a truth that had grown for some time on the edge of his awareness, now brought into sharp relief. He thought: two thrones for the price of a few hire swords and a dose of pleasure drug.”
― C.S. Pacat, quote from Captive Prince

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