Resilience Building Quotes

We learn from failure, not from success!

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.'

It can be dangerous to weaken the strong in our attempts to strengthen the weak.

A child who has overcome challenges with proper emotional support will emerge stronger.

Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.

The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It's just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it.

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.

When you're doing what you love to do, you become resilient. You create a habit of taking chances on yourself. If you do what's expected of you, and things go poorly, you will look to external sources for what to do next, because that will be your habit. You will be standing there frozen. If you are just filling a role, you will be blindsided.

Too often, as a global community of humanitarians, we meet the needs of the same families, the same individuals, the same communities crisis after crisis, when we are focused on meeting crisis needs but not on building resilience.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

The one thing that makes me laugh about the phrase 'the worst week of my life' is that nobody actually uses that phrase when something really bad happens.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

I purposely put myself in new, stressful situations so that I can continuously learn.

I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, 'Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,' and he would high-five me and say, 'Way to go.'

Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.

Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher.

Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets - an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums.

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration. Unfortunately, some people don't get to the other side... They allow frustration to keep them from taking the necessary actions that would support them in achieving their desire. You get through this roadblock by plowing through frustration, taking each setback as feedback you can learn from, and pushing ahead.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

In his speech President Bush said we need to rebuild Iraq, provide the people with jobs, and give them hope. If it works there maybe we'll try it in New Orleans.

Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience - ensuring we'll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.

But I don't think I've grown up to be a damaged adult.