Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

I've become a pretty tough cookie after having a divorce. I think that I've persevered through a lot of talk.

I don't see life as an opportunity to see how far you can go in the pursuit of pain, although I think I've challenged it a bit.

I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don't think I would be as good a person.

Man's freedom is never in being saved from troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy.

Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

You have to go through tough experiences and go through some battles, in order to be stronger.

What did not demolish me simply polished me.

I don't know who will overcome losses, some losses aren't meant to be overcome, but all losses make for good stories and good character development and all the jazz that makes a show compelling and watchable.

It is... very helpful to think of adversity not so much as a threat to our peace of mind but rather as the very means by which patience is attained.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what's hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths.

Difficult times are the greatest opportunities in disguise. When we face difficult times we have to put in determined work to get ourselves into joy. Difficult times are your greatest opportunity to practice yourself into joy!

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

Hardships make or break people.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

Don't use the hardships of your past as excuses to deny the possibilities of your future.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. . . . You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.

Every negative is a positive. The bad things that happen to me, I somehow make them good. That means you can't do anything to hurt me.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.

That which does not kill me can only make me stronger.

When you think life is tough, it can get a lot tougher.

I love hearing stories about, you know, people who are overcoming challenges in their life. And when you experience hardships, you can either fold or rally, and just by a paradigm shift in your belief system.

The thing about happiness is that it doesn't help you to grow; only unhappiness does that. So I'm grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I've had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.