Quotes about Resilience

The gospel is a powerful word, but it cannot do its work without trials. No one will discover its power unless they experience it. The gospel can show its power only where there is a cross and where there is suffering.

The world is a head of thistles; whichever way you turn it, it stretches the thorns about itself.

And the human mind endures misfortunes of any kind more easily than prosperity and abundance, as the German proverb puts it: "Strong legs are needed to be able to endure good days.

Hence one should follow the advice of the hermit to whom a youth complained that he rather often experienced imaginations concerned with lusts and other sins and to whom the old man replied: "You cannot prevent the birds from flying over your head. But let them only fly and do not let them build nests in the hair of your head. Let them be thoughts and remain such; but do not let them become conclusions."32

Therefore when we are afflicted and disciplined, our heart must be aroused against the feeling of evil, and we must say (cf. Ps. 118:17): "I shall not die, but I shall live, however different it may appear. Although I may, indeed, be compelled to despair of myself, I shall nevertheless hope in Him who made all things out of nothing and can restore me intact after being reduced to nothing, to my very great benefit and that of others.

He would like best of all to persecute us with fire and sword, but this method has availed him little because through the blood of martyrs the church has been watered.

That is, as he says here, he should bend off neither to the right hand nor to the left, but move forward straight and firmly in prosperity and adversity, in strength and weakness, in glory and shame, clinging faithfully and bravely to the Word of God alone.

They turn the heart away much more strongly than adversity and want do, as he says in his song (Deut. 32:15): "Having become swollen, fat, and thick, he rebelled"; and (Prov. 1:32): "The prosperity of the foolish destroys them"; as is said also in the German proverb: "You need strong legs to hold up under good days." For man endures evil more easily than good, as the poet says: "Luxury has invaded as a deadlier foe."2

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement; one elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest."