What are trials?

Famous quotes containing the word trials:

    Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.
    Maggie Kuhn (b. 1905)

    All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.
    Christina Stead (1902–1983)

    Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.
    Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 10 (1919)