43 Empowering Resilience & Adversity Quotes to Inspire You

Insightful quotes on resilience can inspire and motivate you to dig deeper and find your more resilient self while encouraging you to explore the vast literature on this exciting topic.

Here is a list of 43 quotes drawn from a broad and in-depth literature review of research studies and review papers that examine the fascinating and valuable concept of resilience.

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Introducing Resilience

We begin with quotes from psychiatrist Michael Rutter, sometimes described as the father of child psychology, to introduce you to the concept of resilience. Rutter is one of the seminal figures in recognizing the importance of resilience to wellbeing and has inspired a great deal of the research that followed.

Resilience is our ability to bounce back from life’s challenges and unforeseen difficulties, providing mental protection from emotional and mental disorders.

Michael Rutter (1985)

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 (2012)

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 (1993)

[R]esilience can be defined as reduced vulnerability to environmental risk experiences, the overcoming of a stress or adversity, or a relatively good outcome despite risk experiences.

Michael Rutter (2012)

Resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may involve a complicated mixture of psychological habituation, changes in mental set, alterations in perceived and actual self-efficacy, hormonal changes … and neural alterations.

Michael Rutter (2012)

[R]esilience 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 (2012)

What Is Resilience?

The following quotes provide an insight into what resilience is and the human ability to withstand pressure and overcome difficulty.

[P]sychological resilience refers to the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2016)

[R]esilience represents a constellation of characteristics that protect individuals from the potential negative effect of stressors.

Ivan Robertson et al. (2015)

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 et al. (2011)

Resilience has been described as the capacity for positive outcomes despite challenging or threatening circumstances.

Byron Egeland et al. (1993)

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.

Ivan Robertson and Cary Cooper (2013)

[I]t 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 and John Wilson (2005)

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 (2006)

Resilience embodies the personal qualities that enable one to thrive in the face of adversity.

Kathryn Connor and Jonathan Davidson (2003)

Resilience can be viewed as a defence 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 et al. (2010)

When resilience is conceived as a trait, it has been suggested that it represents a constellation of characteristics that enable individuals to adapt to the circumstances they encounter.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2012)

[R]esilience 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 et al. (2007)

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 and James Cranford (2008)

Resilience in the Broader Context

Like all psychological concepts, resilience does not stand alone but instead exists within both a physical and mental context, on which it both depends and impacts:

Internal locus of control influences responses to stressful events by improving coping strategies and reducing anxiety. Thus, perceived control is a key marker of stress resilience.

Tonya Jacobs et al. (2011)

[A]ny psychological resilience training program should, as much as practically possible, consider the broader environment within which individuals operate.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2016)

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 and Chris Watkin (2004)

If we want to help vulnerable youngsters become more resilient, we need to decrease their exposure to potent risk factors and increase their competencies and self-esteem, as well as the sources of support they can draw upon.

Emmy Werner (1995)

Increasingly, researchers focused on identifying the characteristics of individuals, particularly young people, who thrived while living in difficult circumstances, such as poverty and parental mental illness.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2013)

[T]he concept of mental resilience is crucial to our understanding of how risks may be modified and disorders prevented.

Dmitry Davydov et al. (2010)

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

George Bonanno (2004)

Stable, healthy, and resilient physicians are also better equipped for the emotionally and physically demanding tasks of providing care, comfort and hope to patients.

Laura Dunn et al. (2008)

Mental toughness can, therefore, be conceived as an individual’s propensity to manage the demands of environmental stressors, ranging from an absolute resilience to extreme vulnerability.

David Fletcher and Jim Fletcher (2005)

Resilience is viewed as a vital attribute for nurses because it augments adaptation in demanding and volatile clinical environments such as operating rooms.

Brigid Gillespie et al. (2007)

Firstly, it is unrealistic to expect pupils to be resilient if their teachers, who constitute a primary source of their role models, do not demonstrate resilient qualities.

Qing Gu and Christopher Day (2007)

All mentally tough individuals are resilient, but not all resilient individuals are mentally tough.

Peter Clough and Doug Strycharczyk (2015)

Being able to move on despite negative stressors does not demonstrate luck on the part of those successful individuals but demonstrates a concept known as resilience.

Michele Tugade and Barbara Fredrickson (2004)

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 (2017)

Resilience is experienced as a global process relating to psychological, social and behavioral qualities involving genetic, developmental and neurochemical mechanisms.

Meetu Khosla (2017)

Resilience is believed to be a process rather than a single event and a continuum rather than a binary outcome.

Meetu Khosla (2017)

Family environments characterized by stability, cohesion, organization, and preservation of routines and rituals may be most conducive to resilience among adolescents.

Hyun Lee and James Cranford (2008)

Resilience research has substantial potential to guide the development of effective interventions for diverse at-risk populations … to forces that are protective in nature as well as to those that exacerbate vulnerability, and to the mechanisms that underlie their effects.

Suniya Luthar and Dante Cicchetti (2000)

[I]ndividuals who are exposed to moderately stressful experiences and who have the initial resources necessary to overcome those stressors may develop a resilience to the deleterious effects of later stress.

Lisa Neff and Elizabeth Broady (2011)

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 (2005)

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 (2008)

[I]t also appears that coping and parenting skills and parent-child relations may be an important focus of resilience-based interventions following mass violence and disaster.

Cale Palmer (2008)

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 and Lars Bergman (2002)

The conclusion that resilience is made of ordinary rather than extraordinary processes offers 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 (2001)

[P]ositive psychology poses important questions for resilience investigators about the differentiation of challenging experiences that undermine development versus those that promote development.

Ann Masten (2001)

What is Your Favorite Positive Psychology Quote?

The above quotes are taken from a sample of the vast amount of resilience research available. They represent the diversity of past research and the wealth of studies underway in the vital concept of resilience.

We would love to hear more of your thoughts and invite you to comment below.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Grief Exercises [PDF] for free.