Resilience

101 Quotes That Will Help You Build Emotional Resilience

Happiness is as much a product of sensory enjoyment as it is discipline and purpose. 
Brianna Wiest
July 6, 2016
“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Tagged: Philosophy, How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Yes, awe arises during the extraordinary: when viewing the Grand Canyon, touching the hand of a rock star like Iggy Pop, or experiencing the sacred during meditation or prayer. More frequently, though, people report feeling awe in response to more mundane things: when seeing the leaves of a Gingko tree change from green to yellow, in beholding the night sky when camping near a river, in seeing a stranger give their food to a homeless person, in seeing their child laugh just like their brother.”
— Dacher Keltner, How Awe Makes Us More Human
Tagged: The Art of Awareness, The Person You'll Become, How To Think, Philosophy
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Love, Philosophy
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet
Tagged: Philosophy, The Person You'll Become, The Art of Awareness, How To Think
“For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.”
— Eric Roth, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
Tagged: The Person You'll Become, The Art of Awareness, Philosophy, Love
“I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.”
— Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange
Tagged: The Person You'll Become, The Art of Awareness, Love, Philosophy, How To Think
“If you’re an artist there are always new modes of expression, new things to create and communicate. The world isn’t fixed, it’s always changing, so that means you have to create anew in light of the changes... I don’t think any good scientist thinks one day science will come to an end. Science is about questioning, new ways of looking at things, new devices. That’s entirely open-ended.”
— Olivia Goldhill, Neuroscience confirms that to be truly happy, you will always need something more
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
— C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Philosophy, Psychology
“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
— Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”
— Thomas Hardy, Far From The Maddening Crowd
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.”
— Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense — if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example — then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.”
— Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
Tagged: The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy, How To Think
“All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.”
— Michael Crichton, Disclosure
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”
— J.B. Priestley, Dangerous Corner
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology
“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”
— Mark Epstein, Open To Desire
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything – evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing – it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.”
— Michael Crichton, Prey
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.”
— David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“I've come to the point where I never feel the need to stop and evaluate whether or not I am happy. I'm just 'being', and without question, by default, it works.”
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
Tagged: The Art of Awareness, The Person You'll Become, How To Think
“Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions.”
— George W. Crane, Psychology Applied
Tagged: How To Think, Psychology, Philosophy, The Art of Awareness
“But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective - not only our proclaimed - values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning of life.”
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Philosophy, Psychology
“The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other.”
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
Tagged: Psychology, Philosophy, How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“If you feel like you don't fit in this world, it's because you're here to help create a new one. ”
— Unknown, Purpose
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“A drop of ink can make a million think. ”
— Lord Byron, Lord Byron's Novel
Tagged: How To Think, Psychology, Philosophy, The Art of Awareness, The Person You'll Become
“An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology — all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.”
— Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything
Tagged: Psychology, Philosophy, The Art of Awareness, How To Think
“Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.”
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
Tagged: Psychology, Philosophy, The Art of Awareness, How To Think
“We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. We tend to think other people's mistakes are caused by character flaws while our mistakes are due to situational factors. Our good behavior is attributable to fundamental traits while other people's is temporary and situational. Thus we own our strengths and disavow our weaknesses. This is a big obstetrical to overcoming self-destruction behavior, it justifies all our attempts to deny or put off our need to change and rationalizes the consequences of our actions.”
— Richard O'Connor, Rewire Your Brain
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“What happens to us are tiny matters compared to how we respond. ”
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great Mind
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“The way other people feel about you is not your responsibility.”
— Chrissy Stockton, Chrissy Stockton, 100 Reasons Losing Him Is Not A Loss
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“At the still point, there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Tagged: The Art of Awareness, How To Think