These 17 Resilience Quotes Will Remind You That We’ll Get Through This

As the world is adapting to what is now the “new normal,” Fairygodboss wants to be there for you every step of the way. Keep reading for timely advice and join our Navigating the New Normal group for continued support.

The emergence of COVID has tested the metal of many of us, and the storm isn’t over yet. But where there’s been loss and difficult lessons, so, too, have there been opportunities to reflect and reset. The pandemic has made it impossible to ignore many of the systemic inequities that afford certain people protection right now and leave others vulnerable and exposed. 

Resilience shouldn’t only be a marker of individual strength and ability. By working on fostering our sense of resilience, through psychologist-approved habits, we’ll be better able to weather storms personally and as communities, too. We have to do better as a society to take care of one another, and there are a lot of reasons to remain hopeful that, on the other side of this, a juster version of society can be built. Strength is something that can and should be shared. 

In the meantime, here are 17 quotes about resilience that will help remind you that you — and us, and all of us — will get through this.

1. “Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

― Nelson Mandela

2. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

― Maya Angelou

3. “Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” 

— Albert Camus

4. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” 

– Helen Keller

5. “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” 

― Japanese Proverb

6. “Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” 

– Mary Oliver

7. "The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

― Thomas Edison

8. “I was set free because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” 

— J.K. Rowling

9. “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” 

– C.S. Lewis

10. “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” 

– Vivian Greene

11. “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

– Albert Camus

12. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’”

— Eleanor Roosevelt 

13. “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

14. “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

15. “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

– Barack Obama

16. "Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise."

– Maya Angelou

17. "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

— Dolly Parton