Quotes About Strength

We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, 'and so you can stand less and less.

I'm going to pray God," said John—and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say—"to keep me, and make me strong ... to stand ... to stand against the enemy ... and against everything and everybody ... that wants to cut down my soul.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, 'and so you can stand less and less.

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.

I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, from, and sideways. Shit-he weren't going to beat my ass, then. And if he tried to kill me. I'd take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is just not true that one can live by them – not, that is, if one wishes really to live.

hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' [...] 'and so you can stand less and less.

The people did not go away, of course; once a people arise, they never go away (a fact which should be included in the Marine handbook).

Honey," he said, "you ain't no bigger than a minute." She sighed. "Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.

You must pray,' she says, very soberly. I assure you. Even just a little prayer, from time to time. Light a little candle. If it were not for the prayers of the blessed saints, one could not live in this world at all.

while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.

It's funny what you hold on to to get through terror when terror surrounds you.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset, as the strength of your leadership personality can deter people from bringing you the brutal facts.

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

These studies looked at people who had suffered serious adversity—cancer patients, prisoners of war, accident victims, and so forth—and survived. They found that people fell generally into three categories: those who were permanently dispirited by the event, those who got their life back to normal, and those who used the experience as a defining event that made them stronger.53

I've come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside

Courage, it's said, is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in its presence.

Credo che il periodo che intercorre tra la prima apparizione degli stati e la loro egemonia sui popoli non statali, per i barbari abbia rappresentato una sorta di «età dell'oro» nel senso che, sotto molti aspetti, era «meglio» essere un barbaro a causa dell'esistenza degli stati, a patto che questi stati non fossero troppo forti.