L10 · Lens
Suffering as catalyst
Use hardship as the stimulus that builds capacity, depth and the 'great health'.
Use: Adversity, recovery, comfort-softness, post-crisis rebuilding.
Boundary: Growth follows honest reckoning with pain.
Cues
Showing 7 of 7 cues
“Excellence withers without an adversary. It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”
“I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again ... I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them, I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.”
“Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths ... Dig deeply. You possess strengths you might not realize you have. Find the right one. Use it.”
“Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people ... and ask yourself whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and eternal resistance ... do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.”
“From such abysses [of suffering] one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin ... with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses ... more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”
“It is circumstances which show men what they are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like the trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. “For what purpose?” you may say. Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.”
“What a caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”