Quotes About Resilience

Heartaches, disillusionments, disappointments, and hurts from people you least expect will either cause a soul to become bitter, hostile, angry, and disillusioned in life or drive the soul to search above and beyond just the physical and material things of life into a quest for spiritual things and into the arms of God.

Cultism—like all totalism and fundamentalism—is a reaction against the potential confusions of protean openness. In that sense cultism is reactionary not only in its constraints on the self but on its efforts to stop the flow of history. Expressions of collective proteanism, one of which Václav Havel called "living in truth," can be viewed as a return to the resilience of the self and its dynamic relationship to the historical process.

But rather than collapse under these threats and pulls, the self turns out to be surprisingly resilient. It makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow keeps going. What may seem to be mere tactical flexibility, or just bungling along, turns out to be much more than that. We find ourselves evolving a self of many possibilities, one that has risks and pitfalls but at the same time holds out considerable promise for the human future.

Always leave a way out, unless you really want to find out how hard a man can fight when he's nothing to lose.

Do not trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.

Dovie'andi se tovya sagain!

You didn't listen to me, Lan whispered. One last lesson. The hardest. Demandred struck, and Lan saw his opening. Lan lunged forward placing Demandred's sword point against his own side and ramming himself forward onto it. I did not come here to win, Lan whispered, smiling. I came here to kill you. Death is lighter than a feather. Demandred's eyes opened wide, and he tried to pull back. Too late. Lan's sword took him straight though the throat.

Yes, I'm alive, Mat said. I'm usually pretty good at staying alive. I've only failed one time that I can remember, and it hardly counts.

Cauthon lives, Arganda said. And that's bloody amazing, considering that someone blew up his command post, set fire to his tenet, killed a bunch of his damane, and chased off his wife. Cauthon crawled out of it somehow. Ha! Abell Cauthon said. That's my boy.

Relax, lad. Take life as it comes. Run when you have to, fight when you must, rest when you can.

Take what you can have. Rejoice in what you can save, and do not mourn your loses for too long.

I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.

You break your neck, and I'll see it mended just so I can break it again. ~ Nynaeve

You'll use it, boy, and as long as you hate using it, you will use it more wisely than most men would. Wait. If ever you don't hate it any longer, then will be the time to throw it as far as you can and run the other way.

A young wolfhound must meet his first wolf someday, but if the wolf sees him as a puppy, if he acts the puppy, the wolf will surely kill him. The wolfhound must be a wolfhound in the wolf's eyes even more than in his own, if he is to survive.

The only way was forward, whatever lay at the end.

Hardness shatters; strength endures.

hope is like a piece of string when you're drowning; it just isn't enough to get you out by itself.

No man can walk so long in the Shadow that he cannot come again to the Light.

Nobody walks a difficult path without stumbling now and again. It didn't break you when you fell. That's the important part.

Change what you can if it needs changing, but learn to live with what you can't change.

Anything can be a weapon, if the man or woman who holds it has the nerve and will to make it so.

Moiraine: It seems Ryne was wrong as well as a Darkfriend. You were better than he. Lan: He was better. But he thought I was finished, with only one arm. He never understood. You surrender after you're dead.

It has been quite a weight, hasn't it? Tam asked. What weight? Rand replied. That lost hand you've been carrying. Rand looked down at his stump. Yes. I believe it has been at that.