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 - Trees Preach
Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
—Hermann Hesse - Learning to become resilient
When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience.
—Jaeda Dewalt - That which does not kill us …
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
—Friedrich Nietzsche - Finding the Way Back Home
If the light is in your heart, you will find your way home.
—Rumi - 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 - All Our Wisdom
All our wisdom is stored in the trees.
—Santosh Kalwar - Impact of Hardship
Hardship often prepares ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.
—C.S. Lewis - Flexible Strength
The bamboo that bends in stronger than the oak that resists.
—Japanese Proverb - Meaning & Purpose
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
—Viktor Frankl - Carrying On
Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
—Albert Camus, French philosopher, author, and journalist - Forest Canopy
To really feel a forest canopy one must use different senses, and often the most useful one is the sense of imagination.
—Joan Maloof - Resilience and Compassion
Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others.
—Sharon Salzberg - What am I looking for?
Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.
—Rumi - Mighty trees will fall …
Mighty trees will fall, their trunks becoming fertile ground for new growth and life yet unseen. So it would be with our elders and all of the generations to come after them.
—Barbara Becker, Heartwood - Wisdom’s Root
Wisdom has its root in Goodness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson - Determining Your Life Story
It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop.
—Dieter Friedrich Uchtdorf - Courage, Serenity, Insight
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.
—The Serenity Prayer (attribution uncertain) - Heartstrings
Heartstrings hold tighter than the roots of a live oak tree holdin’ through tornado winds …
—Alison Krauss, Heartstrings - What’s possible
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
—Saint Francis of Assisi
