Gretchen Bleiler Quotes

Revelations come when you're in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.

I'm always looking for a new thing that really terrifies me that I think I can't do it and accomplish that.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

If I'm left high and dry at the end of this wild journey, just taking it is a great feeling.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

In my life, being true to myself certainly hasn't made things easier. You could never accuse me of taking the path of least resistance.

Your life is a learning process - you can only become wiser from learning. Sometimes you might have to attract making a painful mistake to learn something important, but after the mistake you have far greater wisdom. Wisdom cannot be bought with money - it can only be acquired through living life. With wisdom comes strength, courage, knowing, and an ever-increasing peace.

I guess that one of the most important things I've learned is that nothing is ever completely bad. Even cancer. It has made me a better person. It has given me courage and a sense of purpose I never had before. But you don't have to do like I did...wait until you lose a leg or get some awful disease, before you take the time to find out what kind of stuff you're really made of. You can start now. Anybody can.

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.

Adventure is something out of the usual pattern, a point at which you cannot avoid confronting the unknown, so that you have to dig inside yourself to find the courage and resources to deal with what may lie ahead, and to succeed.

Every time you meet a situation you 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 were before.

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.

Sometimes I just like the feeling of being a minority and seeing how far you can push yourself in extreme circumstances.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

Everyone tells us you really don't know what you're capable of till you're in the middle of it.

Sometimes you surprise yourself with what you can handle, and if you come out the other end with some wisdom, then it's not such a bad thing.

Getting on a plane is hard for me, but I do it, because travel is vital to me.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.

For me, a happy ending is not everything works out just right and there is a big bow, it's more coming to a place where a person has a clear vision of his or her own life in a way that enables them to kind of throw down their crutches and walk.

People are constantly clamoring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life - to learn something is a joy to me.

Some people say, 'Write what you know.' My thing is, 'Write what scares you.'