S03 · Adversity and Setbacks
Resilience and rebuilding after defeat
Rising after a major blow, failure or crisis and forging greater strength from the ordeal.
Cues
Showing 9 of 9 cues
“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.”
“There is a certain extra gain in having conquered [inner] territory entirely through one’s own initiative, courage, and perseverance.”
“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.”
“Excellence withers without an adversary. It is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it.”
“Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”
“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world ... The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma ... I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children ... these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.”
“The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.”
“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.”
Donald L. Hollowell: smart perseverance under injustice
Civil-rights attorney Donald Hollowell fought uphill across segregated Georgia day after day, winning the desegregation of the University of Georgia and freeing Martin Luther King Jr. while enduring hostile courts and constant danger without losing his composure: 'you can't get angry; you have to get smart.