Quotes About Resilience

I have read, upon my knees, the story of Gethsemane, where the Son of God prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from him. I am in the Garden of Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing.

We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips.

In our explorations of Ecclesiastes and of our own lives, we have identified three things: Belong to people Accept pain as part of your life Know that you have made a difference

Harold MacMillan

The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

I heard my aunt and uncle come to the door. I heard her voice through the door. "Morris, I'd better go in and speak to him. Did you see the look on his face? It was as if he was a little boy locked out of his home." "No," my uncle said. "Let him alone. He'll get over it soon. He's a real man." They walked away.

Yes, madam," said Mrs. Cozzolina. She knew a lady when she saw one. There was something about them that stood out even when they had fallen upon hard times.

I worked in the mines beside you, and once you work in the mines you never stop bein' a miner, no matter what else you do.

On the inspiration for Never Love a Stranger: "[The book begins with] a poem from To the Unborn by Stella Benson. There were a lot of disappointments especially during the Depression—fuck it—in everyone's life there are disappointments and lost hope…. No one escapes. That's why you got to be grateful every day that you get to the next.

God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, 'Light enters at the place of the wound.

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?

If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything that happens in the world is our doin

When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.

It isn't God's job to make sick people healthy. That's the doctors' job. God's job is to make sick people brave, and in my experience, that's something God does really well. Prayer, as I understand it, is not a matter of begging or bargaining. It is the act of inviting God into our lives so that, with God's help, we will be strong enough to resist temptation and resilient enough not to be destroyed by life's unfairness.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.

God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away.

Prayer, as I understand it, is not a matter of begging or bargaining. It is the act of inviting God into our lives so that, with God's help, we will be strong enough to resist temptation and resilient enough not to be destroyed by life's unfairness.

through the lives and souls of specific individuals. The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact.