Resilience is a gift, one you gain the hard way. You don't grow resilient by fighting what happens, but by honoring the struggle. And that's one of the hardest things there is to do. So, read these resilience quotes. They'll inspire you to own your story and build something new from here, maybe better than before.

All that, and you’re still standing.

25 Resilience Quotes to Help You Honor the Struggle and Move Forward

1. “Resilience is the capacity of a system, enterprise, or person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.” — Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

2. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” — Helen Keller, Helen Keller’s Journal

3. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” — Kahlil Gibran

4. “One small crack does not mean that you are broken, it means that you were put to the test and you didn’t fall apart.” — Linda Poindexter

5. “Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.” — Arthur Golden

6. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” — J.K. Rowling

7. “There is nothing beautiful about the wreckage of a human being. There is nothing pretty about damage, about pain, about heartache. What is beautiful is their strength, their resilience, their fortitude as they display an ocean of courage when they pick through the wreckage of their life to build something beautiful brand new, against every odd that is stacked against them.” — Nikita Gill, Wreckage

8. “When you open up your capacity to experience pain and bow to it, you can see all of life itself. There is no birth of consciousness without pain and no growth of consciousness without pain.” — David McCauley, Addiction to Recovery

9. “And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear, but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.” — Paulo Coelho

10. “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

11. “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” — John Keats

12. “Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.” — Marianne Williamson

13. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” - Maya Angelou

14. “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation—either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

15. “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.” — Thomas Paine, The Crisis

16. “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.” — Elizabeth Edwards

17. “The human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.” — Jodi Picoult

18. “One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: ‘This too shall pass.’” — Alain de Botton

19. “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” — Alain de Botton

20. “To live greatly, we must develop the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and triumph with humility.” — Thomas S. Monson

21. “Even when you felt you weren’t strong enough to survive, somehow you found the strength to survive anyway. What does that say about you other than you are made from the blood of stars, with enough iron in your veins to make ten swords, and the same carbon that makes impossible to break diamonds?” — Nikita Gill, Your Strength

22. “If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.” — Masaru Emoto

23. “You may encounter many defeats but you must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat, so that we can know who we are. So that we can see, ‘Oh, that happened, and I rose. I didn’t run away—I rose right where I’d been knocked down.’ And then that’s how you get to know yourself.” — Maya Angelou, in an interview with Marianne Schnall

24. “Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.” — Edgar Allan Poe, Mesmeric Revelation

25. “Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and the responsibility to pick yourself up.” — Mary Holloway

. . .

Tell me:

Which of these quotes is your favorite?

Tell me in the comments. I read every single one, and I’d love to know!

With love,

Jen

P.S. Never forget how far you’ve come, how much potential you have. Go visit my shop to find the (im)perfect poetry print that celebrates you in your fullness, in your mess and magic and everything in between.