Quotes About Toughness

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we've interpreted as toughness—weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice—only masks the tenderness inside.

They had a toughness and a philosophical attitude which was new to me. Misfortunes which would make the city dweller want to bang his head against a wall were shrugged off with "Aye, well, these things

onto a heap, making a churned brown trail across the whiteness. 'Now then,' he muttered along the side of a half-smoked cigarette. He was over seventy but still ran the smallholding single-handed. He told me once that he had worked as a farm hand for six shillings a day for thirty years, yet still managed

No, I ain't. I'm shit and nails and all kinds of bad news.

Harden your heart.

Now, don't get all weepy on me dear reader.No chin-quivering or nose-sniveling, either. These pages do not need to be all soggy with your mucus.

His sneakers smacked against tree trunks. Bark raked the skin on his hands and face raw. Branches caught at his feathers, and he felt some get yanked out, but he didn't even wince. It felt good, the pain. He wanted more.

When you grow up hard, when you grow up surviving, unfortunately, it helps.

Annie Taliaferro had that hammerhead look about her, like a breachy range cow, or a bunch-quitting steer.

In a world like this with no laws, no charter of human rights, it's the women who suffer. It's the women who learn what it is to be tough, not the men.

That may be the ultimate definition of toughness inside the squared circle - having the will to overcome a serious injury to return to elite status as a main eventer.

The worst insult you can give a professional athlete is to call them soft. And the stereotype out there is that gay is soft.

Be tough … life is. In other words, there is no promise of a rose garden.

Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.

It's no secret that I enjoyed the physical side when I was a player. I was a bumps-and-bruises man.

I was able to convince my body that I could take it and nobody could hurt me. I might've gotten cut, stitches over my eyes. Broken nose. Broken hands. But I never really got hurt.

A fool can never be made to question his own wisdom. And George Groves is very foolish. He believes his own nonsense. He cannot stay with me for 12 rounds. He's not tough enough.

I didn't notice pain in the way that most guys would.

Perhaps we always wondered which of us was tougher, but, if boyhood questions aren't answered before a certain point in time, they can't ever be raised again. So we returned to being gracious to each other, as the wall

And all I managed, barely, was endurance.

Give me a strong back, over a soft heart.

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

It's a cruel world, don't you think?