We offer the following quotations as potential sources of inspiration and food-for-thought. If you have a quote on some aspect of resilience that you would like to share with others, please let us know via our Contact Us form.
- Resilience and Humanity
To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.
—Hannah Gadsby - Resilient Teams
Resilient teams are just as important to businesses as resilient individuals, but while individual resilience is built independently, team resiliency must be carefully cultivated by leadership.
–Harvard Business Review (July 2019) - Forests & Families
Forests are just like human families.
—Suzanne Simard, The Networked Beauty of Forests (TEDEd, 11/2013) - Dare to fail …
Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
—Robert F. Kennedy - Broken places
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway - The Inner Core
The “soul” is that still point at the heart of every person, that deepest center, that point of encounter with the transcendent yet incarnate mystery of God. When the soul is healthy, it is in a living relationship with God; it is firmly rooted in the soil of meaning and is the deepest center of the person.
—Bishop Robert Barron, Lenten Gospel Reflection (3/24/2020) - Turning Misfortunes
There are few misfortunes in the world that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will and the necessary skill.
—Nelson Mandela - Inventing hope …
Hope is invented every day.
—James Baldwin - Encountering Hardships
We all encounter hardships. Some we see coming – others take us by surprise. It can be as tragic as the sudden death of a child, as heartbreaking as a relationship that unravels, or as disappointing as a dream that goes unfulfilled. The question is: When these things happen, what do we do next?
—Sheryl Sandberg - Our protectors …
Trees are, and always have been, dear to us. We see in them our protectors. We sense in them the continuity of life. And we find in their steadfastness, our own steadfastness … Trees hold us fast in their embrace.
—Jill Neimark, The Hugging Tree - The Heart is your Center …
The heart is your center. It’s as central to your soul as your nose is to your face. Yet even though “it’s as plain as the nose on your face” this most obvious thing is often the easiest to ignore.
—Peter Kreeft - Rootedness
The soul wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our own being, resisting the tendency of other faculties, like the intellect and the ego, to uproot us from who we [truly] are.
—Parker J. Parker - Root Structure
Make your root structure around real people.
—Arthur Brooks, Strength to Strength - Heartstrings
Heartstrings hold tighter than the roots of a live oak tree holdin’ through tornado winds …
—Alison Krauss, Heartstrings - Resilience and Compassion
Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others.
—Sharon Salzberg - Founts of Hope
What gives me hope? Young people, the resilience of nature, and the human brain.
—Jane Goodall, ‘The Beat’ Interview (December 2022) - Great Artwork
Any great artwork … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
—Leonard Bernstein - The Challenge of a New Reality
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.
—Elizabeth Edwards - Carrying On
Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
—Albert Camus, French philosopher, author, and journalist - Trim your sails!
She stood in the storm and, when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails.
—Elizabeth Edwards, Attorney and Author
