QuoteProject
...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross.
Cheryl Strayed
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The necessity of overcoming pain and suffering in order to rise and improve oneself.

Cheryl Strayed's quote highlights the duality of personal growth; it suggests that experiences of intense hardship and suffering, symbolized by being 'nailed to the cross,' are often what compel us to rise up and strive for betterment. This metaphor emphasizes that struggle and pain are integral to the human experience and can be powerful catalysts for transformation and resilience.

Themes

GrowthPainResilienceTransformationSuffering

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.

More from Cheryl Strayed

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
Cheryl StrayedRead
The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
Cheryl StrayedRead
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
Cheryl StrayedRead
There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Cheryl StrayedRead
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
Cheryl StrayedRead
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
Cheryl StrayedRead

Similar quotes

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Victor HugoRead
Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.
Elizabeth SmartRead
There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.
Romeo DallaireRead
There is nothing negative about a group of people crying out for democracy - and if my voice counts, I will be vocal.
Shirin NeshatRead
Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.
Roger WatersRead
To be fully human is...to know that it's possible to face the unimaginable and somehow put one foot in front of the other.
Oprah WinfreyRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.