Strength is not what we were sold as kids. It is not muscles. It is not a refusal to cry. Real strength is the quiet decision to get up one more morning and keep going. These ten quotes about strength come from people who knew what it was to be brought low. Read them. Save the one you need.
You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.— Bob Marley Widely attributed to Bob Marley
You do not get to find out what you are made of in good times. You find out in the long week when nobody is helping. You are tougher than you think. You have not been tested yet because you have not had to be.
Strength is not something you have. It is something you find out you have.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.— Albert Camus Return to Tipasa (1952)
You don't lose your warmth when the world goes cold. It just goes underground for a while. There is a fire inside that even your worst season cannot put out. You can rebuild from it.
The hardest winters reveal the warmth you didn't know you had.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.— Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929)
You will not get out of this life unbroken. Nobody does. The question is what you do with the broken places. Some people stay there. Some people heal stronger than they were before the break.
Strength is not the absence of broken places. It is what those places become.
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.— Eleanor Roosevelt You Learn by Living (1960)
Strength is not built in calm. It is built in the moments where you decided you couldn't and then did anyway. Every one of those moments builds the version of you that can handle more next time.
You build strength by doing the next thing you don't think you can do.
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.— Mahatma Gandhi Young India, 1928
Gandhi led a country to freedom while weighing less than 100 pounds. He did it with will. With patience. With refusing to back down on what mattered. That is the kind of strength you can build today.
Strength is decided in your head before it shows up in your body.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.— James Baldwin As Much Truth as One Can Bear (1962)
You will not fix what you refuse to look at. The bad relationship. The job you outgrew. The grief you've been outrunning. Look at it. That is the first hard part. Everything else is easier than not looking.
Looking the hard thing in the face is the first move. There is no move before it.
I am stronger than I am broken.— Roxane Gay Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)
Five small words. Read them like an oath. Say them when the day has pushed you down. You are stronger than the worst thing that happened to you. That worst thing does not get to be the whole story.
You are not your hardest moment. You are everything you became after it.
The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.— Robert Jordan The Fires of Heaven (1993)
Stiff strength snaps. Flexible strength survives. You do not have to be the strongest. You just have to be willing to bend when the storm comes. The wind does not last forever.
Bending is not weakness. It is the kind of strength that lasts.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.— Maya Angelou Letter to My Daughter (2008)
Defeats are not the end. They are the meeting. You meet a version of yourself you could not have met any other way. You learn what you survive. The next defeat is smaller because of it.
You are allowed to lose. You are not allowed to quit thinking of yourself as someone who can come back.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.— Helen Keller Optimism: An Essay (1903)
Read it again. The world is also full of the overcoming. Every person you walk past today has overcome something you cannot see. You are not alone in the hard part. You are joining a club of survivors that includes pretty much everyone.
Suffering is not rare. Neither is overcoming. You are not the first. You will not be the last.
Strength is the quietest virtue. You can't see it on someone from across the room. You can only see it when life is testing them and they keep going. Save these quotes for that day. Better yet, save them for someone else's bad day too. The strongest people get strong by being told they are stronger than they feel.
Save the one that hit you hardest. Come back to it on a hard day. Then keep exploring — read more quotes or read more stories.