Quotes About Resilience

I had continuously to learn to accept God's will—not as I wished it to be, not as it might have been, but as it actually was at the moment.

conditions were degrading only if we let ourselves become degraded.

It was not the Soviet government or the NKVD versus Walter Ciszek. It was God versus Walter Ciszek. God was testing me by this experience, like gold in the furnace, to see how much of self remained after all my prayers and professions of faith in his will.

it was easy to float freely and euphorically into the future, ready to accept whatever God might have prepared for me there. But the future was now the present, and as is always the case, it was a lot more unmanageable and full of bustle than it had seemed in the abstract. Accordingly, my new spirit of interior resolve to search out and understand and accept God's will in every detail of every situation was quickly put to a rude test by the rough and ready realities of life.

There would be a tomorrow, and we would have to live in it—and God would be there as well.

And I learned soon enough that prayer does not take away bodily pain or mental anguish. Nevertheless, it does provide a certain moral strength to bear the burden patiently. Certainly, it was prayer that helped me through every crisis.

For each of us, salvation means no more and no less than taking up daily the same cross of Christ, accepting each day what it brings as the will of God, offering back to God each morning all the joys, works, and sufferings of that day.

One man had been completely submerged in the boiling liquid which inundated the cabin, and in his removal to the deck, the skin had separated from the entire surface of his body. The unfortunate wretch was literally boiled alive, yet although his flesh parted from his bones, and his agonies were most intense, he survived and retained all his consciousness for several hours.

To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

Love is a powerful painkiller.

Those who were cowards never started, and those who were weak were lost on the way, but the brave find a home in every land.

War is the greatest human experience that men have passed through for many centuries. But only when we know, through their own words, the full horror of what they experienced, and the depth and complexity of their feelings when under duress, can we appreciate how they held together and saved the world from despotism.

Someone once told me the one thread that runs through them all is a premium on personal courage - not intellectual courage, but just plain physical courage.

Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit - a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor - that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.

and PWD was soon on the air again. Beyond the perimeter, Snowy Rhoades took charge of mopping up the scattered Japanese. Learning that a small party was hiding up a river near the southeast coast, he loaded a barge with eighteen U.S. infantry and ten armed natives and went after them. They

Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

Im as good as dead, but they haven't buried me yet.

Wenn es sein muss, trete ich auch Zwerge!

but I was urged on by a courage born of despair.

Der Natur sind die Tragödien, die sich in ihr abspielen, egal. Noch kein Galgenbaum hat sich darüber aufgeregt, daß Unschuldige an ihm aufgeknüpft wurden. Kein Grashalm eines Schlachtfeldes trauert den Gefallenen nach.

If what I reading has the power to grip me, I can read under the most difficult circumstances.

If he survived Roaming Rock, he kept telling himself, death would have lost its sting.

Wer einmal gelernt hat, in der Melancholie zu Hause zu sein, der kann es selbst in der schlechtesten aller Welten aushalten. Gute Lektüre, schwarzen Humor und gesunde, gut abgehangene Melancholie, mehr braucht man eigentlich nicht.