100 Top Resilience Quotes That’ll Instantly Fire You Up

The greatest motivational quotations about resiliency reach us on a soul-level. Because they appeal to the parts of ourselves that are striving, suffering, and questioning if we are good enough, these quotations have such great impact.

Resilience, persistence, or discipline, whatever you choose to call it, is essential to your success. When motivation wanes, resilience is what keeps us moving forward.

Resilient people recover quickly from setbacks and carry on living a fulfilling life. Resilience is more easily said than done, though. Being strong and dealing with all that happens in our life might be challenging at times.

All we require at situations like these is a reminder of the strength of our potential. Fortunately, some of humanity's best knowledge has been preserved by history's finest brains, and everyone should read it at least once in their lifetimes. This expertise has been put into a blog that will help you bounce back from failures and provide you with the motivation to keep trying.

100 Top resilience quotes to help you bounce back

1. Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient. — Steve Maraboli

2. Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare. — Angela Duckworth

3. The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived. — Robert Jordan

4. 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

5. Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else. — Henry Ward Beecher

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

7. If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces. — Shane Koyczan

8. No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear. — Greg Kincaid

9. It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment. — Bram Stoker

10. My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon. — Mizuta Masahide

11. Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work through difficult problems. — Gever Tulley

12. You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. — Margaret Thatcher

13. It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

14. Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. — Nelson Mandela

15. I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it. — Maya Angelou

16. Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life. — J.K. Rowling

17. She stood in the storm and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails. — Elizabeth Edwards

18. A good half of the art of living is resilience. — Alain de Botton

19. You must bear losses like a soldier, the voice told me, bravely and without complaint, and just when the day seems lost, grab your shield for another stand, another thrust forward. That is the juncture that separates heroes from the merely strong. — Margaret George

20. Grief and resilience live together. — Michelle Obama

21. No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can’t take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action. — Ryder Carroll

22. On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from having navigated through it. Raise your sail and begin. — Gregory S. Williams

23. I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded. — Gail Borden

24. The difference between a strong man and a weak one is that the former does not give up after a defeat. — Woodrow Wilson

25. It may sound strange, but many champions are made champions by setbacks. — Bob Richards

26. Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly. — Robert F. Kennedy

27. Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. — Confucius

28. Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do right now, and do it. Today is your lucky day. — Will Durant

29. Fall seven times, stand up eight. — Japanese Proverb

30. Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. — Helen Keller

31. If you’re going through hell, keep going. — Winston Churchill

32. When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience. — Jaeda Dewalt

33. Resilience is very different than being numb. Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt. You fall. But, you keep going. — Yasmin Mogahed

34. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice. — Stephen Covey

35. Resilience is the ability to attack while running away. — Wes Fessler

36. Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others. — Sharon Salzberg

37. Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying ‘I will try again tomorrow’. — Mary Anne Radmacher

38. Turn your wounds into wisdom. — Oprah Winfrey

39. Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. — Thomas Edison

40. Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on. — Les Brown

41. Like tiny seeds with potent power to push through tough ground and become mighty trees, we hold innate reserves of unimaginable strength. We are resilient. — Catherine DeVrye

42. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength – if we have the virtue of resilience. — Eric Greitens

43. Successful people demonstrate their resilience through their dedication to making progress every day, even if that progress is marginal. — Jonathan Mills

44. We all have battles to fight. And it’s often in those battles that we are most alive: it’s on the frontlines of our lives that we earn wisdom, create joy, forge friendships, discover happiness, find love, and do purposeful work. — Eric Greitens

45. Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough. — Og Mandino

46. I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance

Never settle for the path of least resistance — Lee Ann Womack

47. Resilience isn’t a single skill. It’s a variety of skills and coping mechanisms. To bounce back from bumps in the road as well as failures, you should focus on emphasizing the positive. — Jean Chatzky

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

49. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice. — Angela Duckworth

50. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. — Friedrich Nietzsche

51. Resilience is our ability to bounce back from life’s challenges and unforeseen difficulties, providing mental protection from emotional and mental disorders. — Michael Rutter

52. Resilience represents a constellation of characteristics that protect individuals from the potential negative effect of stressors. — Ivan Robertson

53. Definitions have evolved over time but fundamentally resilience is understood as referring to positive adaptation, or the ability to maintain or regain mental health, despite experiencing adversity. — Helen Herrman

54. Resilience has been described as the capacity for positive outcomes despite challenging or threatening circumstances. — Byron Egeland

55. The behavioral component of resilience enables people to remain effective at home and work, able to focus on relevant tasks and goals and carry them out. — Cary Cooper

56. It is possible to define the property of resilience as a complex repertoire of behavioral tendencies that may be evoked or activated by environmental demands. — Christine Agaibi and John Wilson

57. Resilience is seen as more than simple recovery from insult, rather it can be defined as positive growth or adaptation following periods of homeostatic disruption. — Laura Campbell-Sills

58. Resilience embodies the personal qualities that enable one to thrive in the face of adversity. — Kathryn Connor and Jonathan Davidson

59. Resilience can be viewed as a defense mechanism which enables people to thrive in the face of adversity and improving resilience may be an important target for treatment and prophylaxis. — Dmitry Davydov

60. When resilience is conceived as a trait, it has been suggested that it represents a constellation of characteristics that enable individuals to adapt to the circumstances they encounter. — David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar

61. Resilience arises out of a belief in one’s own self-efficacy, the ability to deal with change, and use of a repertoire of problem-solving skills. — Brigid Gillespie

62. Resilience can refer to positive adjustment in the face of adversity. Resilience has also been defined as the capacity of individuals to cope successfully with significant change, adversity or risk. — Hyun Lee and James Cranford

63. Resilience is fundamentally underpinned by the concept that it is not so much the hard times we face that determine our success or failure as the way in which we respond to those hard times. — Rachel Jackson and Chris Watkin

64. If we want to help vulnerable youngsters become more resilient, we need to decrease their exposure to potent risk factors and increase their competencies and self-esteem, as well as the sources of support they can draw upon. — Emmy Werner

65. Resilience to the unsettling effects of interpersonal loss is not rare but relatively common, does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions. — George Bonanno

66. Stable, healthy, and resilient physicians are also better equipped for the emotionally and physically demanding tasks of providing care, comfort and hope to patients. — Laura Dunn

67. Resilience is viewed as a vital attribute for nurses because it augments adaptation in demanding and volatile clinical environments such as operating rooms. — Brigid Gillespie

68. Firstly, it is unrealistic to expect pupils to be resilient if their teachers, who constitute a primary source of their role models, do not demonstrate resilient qualities. — Qing Gu and Christopher Day

69. All mentally tough individuals are resilient, but not all resilient individuals are mentally tough. — Peter Clough and Doug Strycharczyk

70. Being able to move on despite negative stressors does not demonstrate luck on the part of those successful individuals but demonstrates a concept known as resilience. — Michele Tugade and Barbara Fredrickson

71. Resilience is a process and a staircase. You might be on step four of the staircase, and I might be on step one, but we can both keep moving up the staircase so that our resilience levels will hopefully exceed the rising tide of stress. — Glenn Schiraldi

72. Resilience is experienced as a global process relating to psychological, social and behavioral qualities involving genetic, developmental and neurochemical mechanisms. — Meetu Khosla

73. Family environments characterized by stability, cohesion, organization, and preservation of routines and rituals may be most conducive to resilience among adolescents. — Hyun Lee and James Cranford

74. Resilience research has substantial potential to guide the development of effective interventions for diverse at-risk populations … to forces that are protective in nature as well as to those that exacerbate vulnerability, and to the mechanisms that underlie their effects. — Suniya Luthar and Dante Cicchetti

75. Individuals who are exposed to moderately stressful experiences and who have the initial resources necessary to overcome those stressors may develop a resilience to the deleterious effects of later stress. — Lisa Neff and Elizabeth Broady

76. Resilience is a multidimensional and not a unitary concept. There is no one characteristic or trait identified as resilience. Rather, there are many behaviors and actions associated with resilience. — Russ Newman

77. In terms of fostering resiliency prior to the development of symptoms, current research suggests that certain aspects of military life, such as field training exercises, unit cohesiveness, physical fitness, and leadership may be beneficial as part of preparedness interventions. — Cale Palmer

78. The study of resilience represents a special subclass of research on positive functioning as it applies to risk populations under adversity… one limitation of resilience research is the neglect of a large range of positive functioning beyond the absence of problems. — Joseph Mahoney and Lars Bergman

79. The conclusion that resilience is made of ordinary rather than extraordinary processes offers a more positive outlook on human development and adaptation, as well as direction for policy and practice aimed at enhancing the development of children at risk for problems and psychopathology. — Ann Masten

80. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, I’m possible! — Audrey Hepburn

81. Someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn’t make a difference in the world. I think that’s just a horrible thing. — John Skoll

82. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. — Arthur Ashe

83. The day is what you make it! So why not make it a great one? — Steve Schulte

84. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. — Jimmy Johnson

85. The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me? — Ayn Rand

86. The secret of getting ahead, is getting started. — Mark Twain

87. There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out. — Sophie Kinsella

88. Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes. — Henry J. Kaiser

89. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle

90. What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world. — Simon Sinek

91. You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it — Mahatma Gandhi

92. You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do — Henry Ford

93. My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present. — Steve Goodier

94. A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent. — Douglas MacArthur

95. People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition. — Bob Nelson

96. Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. — Stephen R. Covey

97. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. — Abraham Lincoln

98. The real competitive advantage in any business is one word only, which is ‘people.’ — Komil Toume

99. If you don’t create a great, rewarding place for people to work, they won’t do great work. — Ari Weinzweig

100. Employees aren’t just workers, they’re the backbone of business and that makes them more important than the boss any day of the week. Good Employees = Good Business. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Conclusion

What you need is a clear understanding of reality and complete confidence in your ability to influence it via your own efforts. That is how resilience and optimism are developed.

And now that you're inspired, encourage your coworkers by sharing this collection of the finest resilience quotes with them.