1. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway published that line in A Farewell to Arms in 1929, a novel drawn from his own service as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, where he was wounded by mortar fire in 1918 at the age of eighteen. The sentence arrives in Chapter 34, and it is deliberately unsentimental. It does not promise that everyone strengthens; it says many do, and it is honest that the breaking is real and sometimes final. What Hemingway captures is the difference between damage and defeat. A bone that has been set and healed is not weaker than it was. Repaired tissue can carry more weight than it did before, because the person now knows exactly where the limit lies and how the repair is done. This is why he wrote about the broken places rather than the healed person as a whole: resilience leaves evidence, and the evidence is not shameful. He later won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, but the line that endures is the one that admits the world gets its hits in first.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

2. “Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Malala Yousafzai spoke these words at the United Nations on July 12, 2013 — her sixteenth birthday — nine months after Taliban gunmen boarded her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and shot her in the left side of her forehead for advocating that girls be allowed an education. What makes the line remarkable is its grammar of reversal. She does not say she became brave; she says weakness and fear died, as if the attack, meant to end her voice, instead ended something inside her that had been holding her back. She is precise that the bullets failed: “out of that silence came thousands of voices.” The following year she became, at seventeen, the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Her resilience was not a return to who she had been before the shooting. It was a different person built in the same body, with the fear burned away.

— Malala Yousafzai, address to the United Nations Youth Assembly (July 12, 2013)

3. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”

J.K. Rowling delivered this at Harvard’s commencement on June 5, 2008, in a speech she pointedly titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.” She had, by then, sold hundreds of millions of Harry Potter books, but she chose to talk about the years before them: a short marriage that imploded, no job, a young daughter to raise, and, as she put it, being “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.” By every conventional measure, she said, she was the biggest failure she knew. Her insight is that this stripping-away was a gift. Failure removed everything inessential, so she could pour her energy into the one thing she actually believed in. The sentence is not a comfort; it is a warning. The only people who never fail are the people who never risk anything, and that safety is its own kind of loss.

— J.K. Rowling, Harvard University Commencement Address (June 5, 2008)

4. “If I’m going to fall, I don’t want to fall back on anything except my faith. I want to fall forward.”

Denzel Washington gave this advice to the graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania on May 16, 2011, and he built the whole speech around a wordplay that most commencement addresses avoid. People always tell you to have something to “fall back on,” he said, but he never understood the phrase. If you are going to fall, fall forward — “at least this way I’ll see what I’m about to hit.” He grounded it in his own early career, including an audition for a Broadway musical he had no business attempting, after which the director cut him off and he failed to get the part. He did not quit; he kept auditioning. Years later he won a Tony Award for Fences at the same Cort Theatre where he had failed that first audition three decades before. The story is the point: forward is the only direction in which a fall can teach you anything.

— Denzel Washington, University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address (May 16, 2011)

5. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career… I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan spoke these words in a 1997 Nike commercial — a script written for him and delivered in his own voice — and the numbers were chosen deliberately to puncture the myth of the flawless champion. Across his career he lost almost 300 games, and twenty-six times he was trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. The line works because it reverse-engineers success instead of celebrating it. Jordan is not saying that failure is secretly good; he is saying that the volume of attempts is the only reason any of them went in. He was cut from his high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore, a rejection he has cited for decades as the moment he started training in earnest. He went on to win six NBA championships and five regular-season MVP awards. The misses are not the opposite of the résumé. They are the method that produced it.

— Michael Jordan, Nike “Failure” commercial (1997)

6. “I really think a champion is defined not by their wins but by how they can recover when they fall.”

Serena Williams said this in an interview with The National after a US Open final, and she immediately extended it: “I have fallen several times. Each time I just get up and dust myself off and I pray, and I’m able to do better.” By the end of her career she held 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of any player in the Open Era, but the résumé hides the recoveries that made it possible. In 2011, at the height of her powers, she suffered a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in her lungs — and spent months uncertain whether she would compete again. She returned and won. That history is what gives the sentence its authority. Anyone can say that winning is not what defines a champion. Serena Williams is one of the few people on earth who could say it and have it read as a description of how she actually lived.

— Serena Williams, interview with The National

7. “I feel like at this point, nothing can break me.”

Simone Biles said this in a March 2024 conversation with NBC Olympics, looking back on the “twisties” that forced her to withdraw from most of the Tokyo Games in 2021 to protect her safety and her mental health. The decision was publicly misread by some as a surrender; it was in fact the hardest kind of resilience, the kind that refuses to keep performing while falling apart. She described the slow climb back as “one step forward, five steps back,” and admitted she walked out of the gym many times, sat and cried, and doubted she could go on. Three years later, at the 2024 Paris Olympics, she won three gold medals and a silver, becoming the most decorated gymnast in history. Her sentence is not a boast from someone who never struggled. It is a verdict from someone who struggled in front of the entire world and came back anyway.

— Simone Biles, conversation with NBC Olympics (2024)

8. “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Amanda Gorman closed her poem “The Hill We Climb” with these lines at the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, less than two weeks after a violent attack on the US Capitol. At twenty-two, she was the youngest inaugural poet in American history and had overcome a speech impediment to perform in front of a global audience. The lines work because they place a demand on the listener. Light is not promised as a guarantee; it is promised as something that exists and must be chosen. Brave enough to see it is the first act, the decision to look for what remains rather than what was lost. Brave enough to be it is the second, harder act: becoming the source of light for someone else. That is where individual resilience turns into something shared, and why her closing couplet became the most quoted poem written this century.

— Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb,” US Presidential Inauguration (January 20, 2021)

Create your own quote graphics

These quotes are meant to be shared. A well-designed quote graphic can stop a scroll, start a conversation, and reach someone at exactly the moment they needed it. Whether you are posting on Instagram, creating Pinterest pins, or designing WhatsApp statuses, Quotes Creator gives you ready-made templates, beautiful fonts, and custom gradients to bring any of these quotes to life in minutes.

Designing quote graphics for “Resilience”

• ✓ Lean into deep, grounded colors — slate blue, burnt amber, forest green, and charcoal — rather than bright celebratory tones
• ✓ Pair a strong serif for the quote with a quiet mono credit line so the words carry the weight
• ✓ Choose imagery that suggests repair and return: dawn breaking, a repaired wall, a path curving upward, water finding its way around stone
• ✓ Keep the text to 2–3 lines so the quote lands in a single glance on a phone
• ✓ Export square for Instagram and portrait for Stories or Pinterest