Desmond Tutu Quotes

people are strong despite suffering, not because of it.

Sure, when you're in the midst of your own suffering, it's easy to convince yourself that you're no good—but we are all tested in this life...The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.

Hard times make you bitter or make you more compassionate.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.

I have a lot of scars, man. My mother said that a man is not a man unless he has a scar on his face. And what she meant by a scar was some kind of battle that you had to go through, whether it was psychological or physical. To her, a scar was actually beautiful and not something that marred you.

When you see how you react when you suffer that's when you know what you are made of.

What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

It is better to have some unhappiness while one is still young, for if a person does not experience some bitterness, his disposition will not settle down.

Pain sure does bring out the best in people, doesn't it?

My life has been full of struggles - coming from a troubled home, moving out when I was fifteen, ending up homeless by eighteen. The one thing I always knew was being jaded and bitter was equal to letting life win.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.

Nietzsche famously said "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you.

Life was brutal and it made victims of everyone.’ (Nykyrian)

The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom-as something they thought was almost a necessity. It's as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

When something bad happens to me, I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.

A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.

Whatever it takes to break you.

The person who can dominate during rough times is the person who can dominate, period.