Quotes About Resilience

When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, "I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.

There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight them."19

Winston Churchill had grasped Eisenhower's hand and told him, with tears in his eyes, "I am with you to the end, and if it fails we will go down together.

quoted General William T. Sherman that "every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster." And I concluded with General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's warning that "no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts." We

The leader of an organization is the engine of change and reform, and his work is never done. If his yellow tablet keeps filling up with ideas, he should keep on truckin'. But if a leader cannot sustain his enthusiasm, energy, and creativity to keep making his institution better, he needs to step aside for someone who can.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.

Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck.

Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration's programs, "We'll just try them…and if they don't work…why then we'll just try something else.

John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia's moods and feelings, I couldn't see her complaining.

And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear—the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.

We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.

It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

Irrational optimism can be great; it's why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

sometimes, it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Failing better is something every stroke sufferer knows about.

All of us fail, but this doesn't mean we are failures.

There are those nights wehn you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one iwll ever kiss your lips again.

when the punishment was sufficient. Even as a boy Boone showed the stoicism

Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.