Psychological Fortitude Quotes

Your mind is your invisible talisman. The letters PMA (positive mental attitude) are emblazoned on one side, and NMA (negative mental attitude) on the other. These are powerful forces.

Let's be honest: Ignoring is acting, and nothing more — acting as though the words or actions of your oppressors don't hurt. You hear the words, you feel the insults, and you bear the blows.

To succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger.

I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?

Not to discover weakness is The Artifice of strength.

When you're in pain, you're genuinely very, very alive, and that's beautiful. Especially emotional pain.

It is better to have some unhappiness while one is still young, for if a person does not experience some bitterness, his disposition will not settle down.

A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.

It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?

Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

The thing to do is to keep your mind when the world around you is losing theirs.

Resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance.

If hardship brought out the worst in people, the human race wouldn't have survived. Right after 9/11, for instance, the murder rate actually went down in New York City. In World War II during the Blitz, the civilians of London were bombed almost every night for six months, but psychiatric admissions declined.

You know you are going to go through your ups and downs in this game.

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

This idea of perpetual happiness is crazy and overrated, because those dark moments fuel you for the next bright moments; each one helps you appreciate the other.

Inner resilience and the ability to bounce back are personal qualities. ... Align yourself with someone who has this kind of resilience so that your own can be strengthened. Find another oak to weather the storm with you. Anyone who is in touch with his or her core self will always respond.

Heart in champions has to do with the depth of our motivation and how well your mind and body react to pressure - that is, being able to do what you do best under maximum pain and stress.

The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.

The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.

Develop a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide!

Attitude lies somewhere between emotion and logic. It's that curious mix of optimism and determination that enables you to maintain a positive outlook and to continue plodding in the face of the most adverse circumstances.

We're all going to face extreme stress in our lives, there's no one who is going to escape that. That's the one thing, rich or poor, I don't care who you are, you're going to lose.

The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable.

I think the bottom line is that if you get through a childhood like mine, it's not at all bad. Obviously, you come out a pretty tough turkey, and you have had all the inoculations you need to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is, most of us don't come out.