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.
- Trees Preach
Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
—Hermann Hesse - Flexibility Like Bamboo
The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.
—Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper - Talent and Effort
As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.
—Angela Duckworth - 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) - 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 - Lifestyle Choice
Resilience … is a lifestyle choice.
—Don Grossnickle, Unbreakable Resilience - 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 - You’ve Got a Friend
There’s nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.
—Bob Ross - Heartstrings
Heartstrings hold tighter than the roots of a live oak tree holdin’ through tornado winds …
—Alison Krauss, Heartstrings - Change
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
―Viktor Frankl - 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 - Rain Dance
Life is not about waiting for the rain to stop. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.
—Deborah Fishman, Life is in the Transitions - Leadership Attributes
Leaders must be tough enough to fight, tender enough to cry, human enough to make mistakes, humble enough to admit them, strong enough to absorb the pain, and resilient enough to bounce back and keep moving.
—Jesse Jackson - Rock Bottom
Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
—J.K. Rowling - 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 - What’s possible
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
—Saint Francis of Assisi - Meaning & Purpose
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
—Viktor Frankl - Making Time
I spent my young adult years postponing many of the small things that I knew would make me happy … I was fortunate enough to realize that I would never have the time unless I made the time. And then the rest of my life began.
—Christopher Peterson, Positive Psychologist - 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 - Success
Success isn’t about conquering something. It’s being happy with who you are.
—Britney Spears
