resilience quotes

Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it they reject themselves.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

If you have to stand and fight, you train yourself so that you’re able to do it.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

I think it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything’s going to be all right, even when you’re not sure it is.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

That’s when you know you’re the greatest: when you’re the greatest, and people still put odds against you.

Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

Man is not made for defeat.

Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

My whole family have all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.

A lot of people tell me a lot of things about my conduct, my game, my future… but I try to stay away from their words of wisdom. I don’t let it distract me. On the field, you will be facing the ball alone. If you fail, you will the only one to blame. So, you should be the one deciding for yourself.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‚Lives of Girls and Women,‘ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‚defeat‘.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head then to crawl on one’s belly, in order to be able to save one’s head.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

I have survivor’s curiosity, I guess.

Courage is grace under pressure.

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

I will not be triumphed over.

Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

I have never been bewildered for long in any fight with our enemies – I was Armed with Insight.

No one can resist the idea of a crippled genius.