Quotes About Overcoming

People rise from unbelievably bleak and desperate ashes to be the one flower in a graveyard to blossom. The sun is always there. But the flower has to be ready to blossom. "That's crazy" is a roadmap. Start with that phrase and circle it. Then draw all the roads that lead out from that spot. They don't all have to end up at the place you expect. Have fun with it. Find different roads and see where they lead.

When I was at my worst, the first thing I had to do was convince myself that I could succeed again.

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

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 bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.

they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

I guess it's true, what they used to tell me-- if you can get through the worst, you'll see the best

Perhaps if you can accept the pain that almost kills you, you can use it, you can become better.

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. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

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. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

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.

What a long way, I thought, I've come — to be destroyed!

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.

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

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse.

What a long way, I thought, I've come—to be destroyed!

A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.

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.

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