60 Resilience Quotes to Help You Withstand Life’s Setbacks

If you need the motivation to help you cope with life’s challenges, read these resilience quotes we’ve compiled!

Resilience is the ability to recover from adverse life events.

Being resilient is a quality that provides us with a solid foundation to keep going. In many difficult situations in life—such as stress and traumas—all we need to do is to be resilient.

When we’re resilient, we can cope and open new doors for our growth and learning. Without this quality, we could get stuck thinking we’re victims and never move past our setbacks.

But, no matter how complex the situation, all we need to do is find reasons that we can cling to and help us keep fighting.

If you’re excited to expand your knowledge about resilience, read this collection. It will give you tips to bounce back from stress, trauma, and failure!

Continue reading the list below.

And don’t forget to check out these grit quotes and determination quotes.

Best Resilience Quotes

1. “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

2. “We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts.” – Brené Brown

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

4. “Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and the responsibility to pick yourself up.” – Mary Holloway

5. “I’m not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example. But if we have someone who loves us—I don’t mean who indulges us, but who loves us enough to be on our side, then it’s easier to grow resilience, to grow belief in self, to grow self-esteem. And it’s self-esteem that allows a person to stand up.” – Maya Angelou

6. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” – Maya Angelou

7. “Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others.” – Sharon Salzberg

8. “Resiliency is something you do, more than something you have. You become highly resilient by continuously learning your best way of being yourself in your circumstance.” – Al Siebert

9. “Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.” – Brené Brown

10. “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

Short Resilience Quotes

11. “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” – Alain de Botton

12. “Resilience is the ability to attack while running away.” – Wes Fessler

13. “He’s a million rubber bands in his resilience.” – Alan K. Simpson

14. “Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn’t.” – Phil Klay

15. “Having high resilience does not mean it doesn’t sometimes sting.” – Aisha Mirza

16. “Resilience can go an awful long way.” – Eddie the Eagle

17. “Resilience: the art of caring for the right things.” – Maxime Lagacé

Also read: Short Quotes, Ambition Quotes

Encouraging Resilience Quotes for Those Who Experience Adversity

18. “When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience.” – Jaeda Dewalt

19. “Resilience can be defined as reduced vulnerability to environmental risk experiences, the overcoming of stress or adversity, or a relatively good outcome despite risk experiences.” – Michael Rutter

20. “Resiliency is the ability to spring back from and successfully adapt to adversity.” – Nan Henderson

21. “Resilience embodies the personal qualities that enable one to thrive in the face of adversity.” – Kathryn Connor

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Resilience is overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially changing, or even dramatically transforming, aspects of that adversity.” – Angie Hart

Also read: Encouraging Quotes, Positive Quotes

Resilience Quotes to Keep You Going

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.” – Jamais Cascio

30. “Resilience is not about being able to bounce back like nothing has happened. Resilience is your consistent resistance to give up.” – Janna Cachola

Resilience Quotes That’ll Assist You in Achieving a Positive Outcome

31. “Resilience results from having the encounter at a time, and in a way, that the body can cope successfully with the noxious challenge to its system.” – Michael Rutter

32. “Resilience has been described as the capacity for positive outcomes despite challenging or threatening circumstances.” – Byron Egeland

33. “Resilience is an inference based on evidence that some individuals have a better outcome than others who have experienced a comparable level of adversity.” – Michael Rutter

34. “Resilience is believed to be a process rather than a single event and a continuum rather than a binary outcome.” – Meetu Khosla

Resilience Quotes to Help You Be Mentally and Emotionally Strong

35. “All mentally tough individuals are resilient, but not all resilient individuals are mentally tough.” – Peter Clough

36. “The concept of mental resilience is crucial to our understanding of how risks may be modified and disorders prevented.” – Dmitry Davydov

37. “Resilience is distinct from mere survival and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction.” – Eric Greitens

38. “Resilience or hardiness is the ability to adapt to new circumstances when life presents the unpredictable.” – Salvatore R. Maddi

39. “You learn to be resilient, to survive when you know you are capable of making a worthy contribution to the world—you fight it when you have nothing to lose and so much to gain.” – Mala Naidoo

40. “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

41. “During difficult times, an important resiliency step is being able to express your feelings in healthy ways. You can’t make feelings go away, but you can move through them.” – Al Siebert

Also read: Mindset Quotes

Resilience Quotes That You Should Add to Your Must-Read List

42. “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

43. “There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing; it turns out.” – Sophie Kinsella

44. “Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable over something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn’t matter.” – Elizabeth Edwards

45. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.” – Gregory Boyle

46. “A few people are born resilient. The rest of us need to work consciously at developing our abilities.” – Al Siebert

47. “Our resilience increases as we recognize the magnitude of what we have already accomplished.” – Patricia O’Gorman

48. “Resilience represents a constellation of characteristics that protect individuals from the potential negative effect of stressors.” – Ivan Robertson

Resilience Quotes That’ll Give You More Knowledge About Human Behavior

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “Resilience needs to be judged, not in terms of superior overall functioning as judged in relation to the population as a whole, but rather in terms of functioning that is relatively better than that shown by others experiencing the same level of adversity.” – Michael Rutter

53. “Resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may involve a complicated mixture of psychological habituation, changes in the mental set, alterations in perceived and actual self-efficacy, hormonal changes, and neural alterations.” – Michael Rutter

Other Resilience Quotes That Are Based on Facts

54. “Psychological resilience refers to the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure.” – David Fletcher

55. “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

56. “Resilience is experienced as a global process relating to psychological, social and behavioral qualities involving genetic, developmental and neurochemical mechanisms.” – Meetu Khosla

57. “The conclusion that resilience is made of ordinary rather than extraordinary processes offer 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

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

59. “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

60. “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

Did These Quotes Provide You With Great Tips About Handling Challenges and Setbacks?

Resilience is something we all have within us. It’s a natural human response that allows us to overcome setbacks and experience less stress in our lives. But, this quality is often overlooked in our busy lives and the pursuit of success.

We all experience life’s ups and downs, and it is through resilience that we can bounce back up from the lowest of lows. If we’re not resilient and if we give up easily, then life’s setbacks will affect our mood, health, and ultimately, our future.

Don’t fret, though, because everyone possesses resilience; you’ll just need to cultivate yours! To do that, you must first become aware of what makes you feel vulnerable. For most, what keeps them down in the dumps is the fear of shame and embarrassment of not being able to succeed.

These feelings are unavoidable, and they’re entirely normal. You’ll just have to learn how to overcome these negative emotions to kickstart your resilient attitude! Remember, it’s always the best time to prove your tenacity and grit when you make a misstep.

So, let all your fears and worries go away. Instead, be resilient when things get hard and always move forward. Try again, and eventually, you’ll succeed at what you’re working hard for!

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Karen Danao

Hi, I’m Karen, a content curator and writer for Quote Ambition; I’m also a marketing and advertising professional. Beyond the keyboard and the screen, I’m someone who’s out to enjoy every bit that life has to offer!

Poetry, philosophy, history, and movies are all topics I love writing about! However, my true passion is in traveling, photography, and finding common ground to which everyone from different cultures can relate.

With the many places I’ve been to, I found that love, inspiration, and happiness are some things that bring people together. No matter how different we are on the outside, I’m a true believer that our emotions don’t lie; if you dig deep into our psyche, we’re all the same inside.

This belief was further amplified when I joined Quote Ambition. Through the quotes I’ve read, collected, organized, and written about, I found that humans are resilient, creative, and compassionate.

We take from each others’ hearts and courage, and it’s through our individual experiences that we learn how to rise above our challenges and pain. In so many ways, Quote Ambition is a platform that allows people from all over the world to gain the inspiration they need anytime, anywhere!

You can find me on MuckRack and LinkedIn.