Quotes about Resilience

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. Merton, Thomas. Thoughts In Solitude (p. 8). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.

Life is easier to take than you think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

All suffering has an end.

When we appropriate God's great enablers-His grace and His peace-we can achieve gentleness and calmness even during hard times.

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.