Quotes about Resilience

SCRIVEN (1820—1886) wrote "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" after his fiancée drowned. George Matheson (1842—1906) wrote "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" after his fiancée rejected him because he was going blind.

God's ownership and sovereignty offer a life-changing and freeing perspective when the house is robbed (or burns to the ground), the car is totaled, the laptop computer is stolen . . . or the diagnosis is terminal cancer.

1 Corinthians 15:58 as follows: "Let nothing move you as you busy yourselves in the Lord's work. Be sure that nothing you do for him is ever lost or ever wasted.

When you pretend you don't feel hurt or angry or devastated, you're not fooling God. Be honest! Don't misunderstand; I am not encouraging you to be angry at God or to blame him. He deserves no blame. Rather, I am encouraging you to honestly confess to God your feelings of hurt, resentment, and anger. Often we look at suffering from our perspective and forget that God sees from another vantage point.

For many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life.

How do we build root systems capable of weathering every storm that seeks to draw us into the temporary and the profane?

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [antiwar graduate students] didn't just crawl back into our library cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for awhile—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.2

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

I try not to think of that," Major Danby admitted frankly. "I try to concentrate on only the big result and to forget that they are succeeding, too. I try to pretend that they are not significant." "That's my trouble, you know," Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. "Between me and every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal.

You can be pitiful, or you can be powerful, but you can't be both