Quotes About Resilience

Putting my hands on. What April couldn't fix Wasn't worth the time: Egg shell & dried placenta Light as memory. Patches of fur, feathers, & bits of skin. A nest Of small deaths among anemone. A canopy edged over, shadowplaying The struggle underneath As if it never happened

Cursing themselves in ragged dreams fire has singed the edges of, they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with. Shimmering fans work against the heat & smell of gunpowder, making money float from hand to hand. The next moment a rocket pushes a white fist through night sky, & they scatter like birds & fall into the shape their lives have become.

See how forgiving - how brave nature is.

Say something about real love. Yes, true love—more than parted lips, than parted legs in sorrow's darkroom of potash & blues. Let the brain stumble from its hidingplace, from its cell block, to the edge of oblivion to come to itself, sharp-tongued as a boar's grin in summer moss —Yusef Komunyakaa, from "Safe Subjects," Neon Venacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

It's Better To Keep On Moving Forward.

Even in despair, man must laugh.

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

I am able to confess because, unlike these patriots, I am not ashamed of my country. And I can lay bare her troubles because I have not lost hope. China is bigger than her little patriots, and does not require their whitewashing. She will, as she always did, right herself again.

[China] is the least concerned about her own salvation. Like a good gambler, she took the loss of a slice of territory the size of Germany itself without a wince.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. Teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, since they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'. On

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown.

Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people's minds.

THE ANCIENT ROMANS WERE USED TO being defeated. Like the rulers of most of history's great empires, they could lose battle after battle but still win the war.

other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

the realest thing in the world is suffering.

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire. Yet

We always prepare ourselves for the previous enemy, even when we face an altogether new menace.

2 As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.

what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.

In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.