Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.

Turmoil is a call for awakening. Every challenge, great or small, is moving you to look deeper and draw forth the highest in you. You're never given a challenge beyond your ability to meet and master. You'll rise above every circumstance because you're greater than any circumstance.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

You find strength in your moments of weakness.

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

What matters most is how you respond to your heartbreaks and your disappointments and your fears. What matters most is who you become in response to them.

We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.

My main inspirations are the people around me, heartbreaks, frustration and everything that makes you feel stronger than you should.

You've been told that you're broken. That you're damaged goods ... there is also Post-Traumatic Growth. You come back from war stronger and more sure of who you are.

It wasn't the tattoo that had changed her, had given her repossession of her body. It was her actions, her choices. It was finding the path when it looked like there weren't any paths to be found.

Every challenge takes you a little deeper and awakens you again and again. Without the challenges, you probably would go to back to sleep. The challenges keep you awake.

Nothing in life has happened to you. It's happened for you. Every disappointment. Every wrong. Even every closed door has helped make you into who you are.

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

Embrace each challenge in your life as an opportunity for self-transformation.

It will feel impossible; like you are dying inside this is your soul crying out for life. It may take everything you have; every ounce of will and strength. You will lose a part of yourself trying to save something essential and innocent. And when you have given everything, you will recover and you will be set free, and you will discover there was even more in you than you ever knew.

Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.

No matter where we live on the planet or how difficult our situation seems to be, we have the ability to overcome and transcend our circumstances.

I completely lost everything, but I gained everything because I lost the fear.

Crippled but free, I was blind all the time I was learning to see.

Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.

Every experience empowers you twice: First when you enter into it with a whole heart, and again when you leave it with a whole heart.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.