There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery. From struggle comes strength.

We win over ‘negative’ with ‘positive’. (Quote Number: #707)

There is nothing we cannot live down, and rise above, and overcome.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

The greatest victory in life is to rise above the material things that we once valued most.

The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences — and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome — to be got over.

Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.

The great Greek philosopher Aristotle claimed that everything happens for a reason. You can apply this when you consider that every experience in your life is designed to shape you and help you grow into the highest and mightiest version of yourself. This means that even a negative experience can be seen as an opportunity for growth, rather than a time for suffering. (This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t grieve or feel down when we do go through painful life experiences, and it’s important to give yourself time to heal after such events.)

That is what is meant, I think by the allegation that it is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences. The situation is roughly this: There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.

Overcome the angry by non-anger; overcome the wicked by goodness; overcome the miser by generosity; overcome the liar by truth.

Life is that which must overcome itself again and again

nothing is so much opposed to fortitude as when one allows oneself to be overcome by gain.

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law” — the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.