We've all heard that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, but that is a dangerous oversimplification. Many of the things that don't kill you can damage you for life.

You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.

What doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger!

Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)

Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

What I thought would kill me, didn't. Every time I said to myself: I can't take this anymore — I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all — and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life.

"The old saw that "sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me" does not, in fact, hold true."

When a principle is strong and (you feel) imperative, everything you do to justify it or rationalize it makes it weaker. Everything.

Lo que no te mata te hiere de gravedad y te deja tan apaleado, que luego aceptas cualquier tipo de maltrato y te dices a ti mismo que eso te fortalece.

But suffering from a life-threatening disease also helped me have a different attitude and perspective. It has given a new intensity to life, for I realize how much I used to take for granted-the love and devotion of my wife, the laughter and playfulness of my grandchildren, the glory of a splendid sunset, the dedication of my colleagues. The disease has helped me acknowledge my own mortality, with deep thanksgiving for the extraordinary things that have happened in my life, not least in recent times. What a spectacular vindication it has been, in the struggle against apartheid, to live to see freedom come, to have been involved in finding the truth and reconciling the differences of those who are the future of our nation.

As Conan the Barbarian famously said, “That which does not kill us does not kill us.”

A frail body weakens the soul. This is the origin of the empire of medicine, an art more pernicious to men than all the ills it claims to cure. As for me, I do not know of what illness the doctors cure us; but I do know that they give us quite fatal ones: cowardice, pusillanimity, credulousness, terror of death. If they cure the body, they kill courage. What difference does it make to us that they make cadavers walk? It is men we need, and none is seen leaving their hands

I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.

Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality - taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be - by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before.
I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume and attitude towards them.
So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to way I thought it ought to.
an ex patient of C. G. Jung (Alchemical Studies, pg 47)