Quotes About Resilience

We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .

Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

I don't think any of us are prepared for the bitter pill we're sometimes asked to swallow.

The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.

Experience had taught me that warthogs who tough it out are better in combat than your natural gazelles.

Now, the challenge is overtly physical during Hell Week—lots of cold, and sleep deprivation, and exhausting exercise in the surf and the mud. But physical transmogrifies to mental, when, after Hell Week, those tadpoles who made it through realize that they can do about 1,000 percent more than they thought they could. They are beginning to think like Warriors.

Ordinarily I believe that I have as high a spirit as the average man, and as solid a resolution; but when one has been dragged through the Valley of Humiliation, and plunged, again and again, into the Waters of Bitterness and Privation, a man can be constrained to a course of action of which, in his happier moments, he would have deemed himself incapable. I know this of my own knowledge.

I will always try To hold my head up to the sky If only just to let you know That straight from my heart I still miss you so.

Let this hell be our heaven.

After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.

Come out, Neville.

A man is not born to run away." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1921).*

We are all of us blue babies. At critical seconds, we all lack necessary air.

The stunted pines elude capture in a thousand sidetracked increments. The wind will never understand them. Like us it is forced to go on.

Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her.

Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

This is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. ... If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

In the real world, the best architects don't solve hard problems they work around them.

Once you accept that failures will happen, you have the ability to design your system's reaction to specific failures. Just as auto engineers create crumple zones---areas designed to protect passengers by failing first---you can create safe failure modes that contain the damage and protect the rest of the system.

La pena va royendo el corazón humano lentamente. La gente cree a menudo que, moviéndose, podrá superarla.

I have always argued that change becomes stressful and overwhelming only when you've lost any sense of the constancy of your life. You need firm ground to stand on. From there, you can deal with that change.

True greatness comes not when things go always good for you; but true greatness comes when you are really tested, when you have taken some knocks, faced some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be atop the highest mountain.

when all else fails, he thought, make an offering to the god of laughter.