Joni Eareckson Tada Quotes

They took away what should have been my eyes (but I remembered Milton's Paradise). They took away what should have been my ears, (Beethoven came and wiped away my tears) They took away what should have been my tongue, (but I had talked with god when I was young) He would not let them take away my soul, possessing that I still possess the whole.

No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy.

Money doesn't bring courage, I learned. It's the other way around. Once I took that lesson to heart, I began to rebuild my life.

The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.

Prayer is essentially about making the heart strong so that fear cannot penetrate there.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

I don't want people to feel sorry for me or pity me - I want people to know that what got me through was human spirit and everyone has that in them.

Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.

It's a sweet thing, faith. With it, you can handle any circumstance, any crisis, because you know God always has your back. And when God is for you, who can be against you? Nobody. As my Aunt Hattie says, "One and God are a majority."

You know God gives me that inner strength that super strength to get through things.

Even when our heart aches, we summon the strength that maybe we didn't even know we had, and we carry on; we finish the race.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

The most important element in human life is faith; if God were to take away all his blessings-health, physical fitness, wealth, intelligence-and leave me with but one gift I would ask him for faith. For with faith in him and his goodness, mercy and love for me, and belief in everlasting life, I believe I could suffer the loss of all my other gifts and still be happy.

Crises can never break the one who relies on God's strength.

A stout heart may be ruined in fortune but not in spirit.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

It is a proof of nobility of mind to despise injuries.

This time her heart would not break, even though it would hurt and hurt for a long time to come. Perhaps for the rest of her life. But it would not break. She had the strength to go on alone.

Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.

Bear patiently, my heart, for you have suffered heavier things.

In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.

There are seldom, if ever, any hopeless situations, but there are many people who lose hope in the face of some situations.