Top 100 Eric Greitens Quotes
#1. If you're a real frogman," he said, "then every time a woman leaves your side, she'll feel better about herself." ... The message felt similar to what Earl had taught: being strong meant being able to do good, to lift up and protect those whose lives you touched.
Eric Greitens
#2. Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes.
Eric Greitens
#3. An unwillingness to endure the hardship of a depressed time keeps us from the possibility of capturing the wisdom and strength and joy that can exist on the other side. There is a season to be sad. Painful things hurt. Allow yourself to be hurt.
Eric Greitens
#4. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre.
Eric Greitens
#5. It was foolish to cast someone as a saint just because they had suffered.
Eric Greitens
#6. Just as any work can be made into a miserable bore, any vocation can be a source of joy
Eric Greitens
#7. It's less about choosing an adventure and more about choosing a path with purpose.
Eric Greitens
#8. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart.
Eric Greitens
#9. Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength - if we have the virtue of resilience.
Eric Greitens
#10. What usually matters in your life is not the magical moment, but the quality of your daily practice.
Eric Greitens
#11. Accept that you are imperfect and always will be. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, but to better your imperfect self.
Eric Greitens
#12. So you ask yourself: Am I willing to take responsibility for my life, in word and in deed? If not, your chances of living a rich and fulfilling life are almost zero. If so, you have the potential for a joyous journey ahead.
Eric Greitens
#13. storytelling is not just a way to remember what happened; it's a way to understand what happened.
Eric Greitens
#14. Failure and pain and hardship have the meaning we choose to give them.
Eric Greitens
#15. Interahamwe and became a murderer. The stories they told were straightforward:
Eric Greitens
#16. Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.
Eric Greitens
#17. Courage overcomes, but does not replace, fear. Joy overcomes, but does not replace, pain.
Eric Greitens
#18. We learn who we are and where we come from, what is right and what is wrong, from hearing and telling stories - something
Eric Greitens
#19. The point is to read in a way that leads to better thinking, and to think in a way that leads to better living.
Eric Greitens
#20. Great calamity met with great spirit can create great strength.
Eric Greitens
#21. There is no school of thought that can save us from the simple fact that hard decisions are best made by good people, and that the best people can only be shaped by hard experience.
Eric Greitens
#22. If you respected someone, then you had to ask something of them.
Eric Greitens
#23. Excellence is renewed through deliberate practice, day in and day out.
Eric Greitens
#24. Eric Hoffer, studied the reasons why people voluntarily give away responsibility and join mass movements and mobs. One quote he collected came from a young German who explained that he joined the Nazi party to be "free from freedom.
Eric Greitens
#25. Energy, curiosity, and wonder are not products of age. They're byproducts of what we do.
Eric Greitens
#26. I had been given the greatest gift an education could provide: I had a better idea of what it meant to live a good life
Eric Greitens
#27. Would you love people the same if they could never die?
Eric Greitens
#28. Insights come through practice. When we work at something, we come to see it differently.
Eric Greitens
#29. The best definition I have ever heard of a vocation is that it's the place where your great joy meets the world's great need. We need all of you to find your vocation. To develop your joys, your passions, and to match them to the world's great needs.
Eric Greitens
#30. Warriors are warriors not because of their strengh, but because of their ability strengh to good purpose
Eric Greitens
#31. Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart and rebuild a weakened will.
Eric Greitens
#32. You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. - VICTOR HUGO
Eric Greitens
#33. It's easier to measure what we've told people than it is to measure how we've changed people. It is easier to preach to people than to practice with them.
Eric Greitens
#34. As warriors, as humanitarians, they've taught me that without courage, compassion falters, and that without compassion, courage has no direction.
Eric Greitens
#35. There were a number of definitions of courage, but now I was seeing it in its simplest form: you do what has to be done day after day, and you never quit.
Eric Greitens
#36. Beware the person who seeks to lead and has not suffered, who claims responsibility on the grounds of a spotless record.
Eric Greitens
#37. If you can fix something that needs to be fixed, go ahead and fix it. But real leadership is most often needed where simple solutions have already been tried and have failed. When things are hard, sometimes the best thing you can do is to drown what's wrong in a sea of what's right.
Eric Greitens
#38. Across the globe, even in the world's "worst places," people found ways to turn pain into wisdom and suffering into strength. They made their own actions, their very lives, into a memorial that honored the people they had lost.
Eric Greitens
#40. You don't have to know what perfect looks like, but you do have to know what better looks like.
Eric Greitens
#41. So let's accept what must be accepted, without letting our acceptance justify inaction. Don't
Eric Greitens
#42. When people have a shared commitment, differences and disagreements don't disappear, but they can be seen in a new light.
Eric Greitens
#43. The world needs many more humanitarians than it needs warriors, but there can be none of the former without enough of the latter.
Eric Greitens
#44. We should be, in part, beginners for our entire lives. Beginning anew refreshes the habit of learning.
Eric Greitens
#45. Yet the basic fact remains: we live in a world marked by violence, and if we want to protect others, we sometimes have to be willing to fight.
Eric Greitens
#46. The work of reflection is something you have to do for yourself. No one else can make you wise.
Eric Greitens
#47. Some people are made stronger by suffering. Others are defeated. The difference is resilience.
Eric Greitens
#48. Why Resilience? Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. - MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI Walker,
Eric Greitens
#49. And it's often in those battles that we are most alive: it's on the frontlines of our lives that we earn wisdom, create joy, forge friendships, discover happiness, find love, and do purposeful work. If you want to win any meaningful kind of victory, you'll have to fight for it.
Eric Greitens
#50. We grow when we recover from the right pain in the right way.
Eric Greitens
#51. I can't speak for Aeschylus or Epictetus or Aristotle. But I am convinced of this: they would have hated having their wisdom confined to classrooms and textbooks. This is wisdom about how to live. And it's your property as much as anyone's. It is yours. Take it. Use it.
Eric Greitens
#52. I can point you in a certain direction, maybe draw you a map and give you some ideas. I can't carry you where you need to go.
Eric Greitens
#53. If you start with humility, you see every person as your teacher.
Eric Greitens
#54. We can only be well led by those who have learned well the habits of resilience.
Eric Greitens
#55. I thought of Pericles' speech to the families of the Athenian war dead, in which he said, What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Eric Greitens
#57. Smiling and breathing. These are simple things. Exercising and serving. These are simple things. Being grateful and gracious. These are simple things. Acting with humility. Acting with courage. These are simple things. Some people try to make this business of living too complicated,
Eric Greitens
#58. The best friends support us, challenge us, inspire us. And we do the same for them.
Eric Greitens
#59. Death is like the sun. It infuses every part of our lives, but it doesn't make sense to stare at it.
Eric Greitens
#60. If we want to change something, we must begin with understanding. But if we want to love something, we must begin with acceptance.
Eric Greitens
#61. One of the reasons you are suffering right now is precisely because the purpose of your struggle is unclear. What are you working toward? What are you fighting for? Who are you going to be?
Eric Greitens
#62. Take care of your people is one of the principle lessons of military leadership. If we take care of our people on deployment, why should that change when we come home?
Eric Greitens
#63. What you will become is a result of what you are willing to endure. Are you willing to work hard? To think hard? I know that you are. You always have been.
Eric Greitens
#64. If people can live through genocide and retain compassion, if they can take strength in pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them.
Eric Greitens
#65. You can put off the life you want to live until you wake up to find that it's too late.
Eric Greitens
#66. In order to train the spirit you had to train both mind and body,
Eric Greitens
#67. Millions of people, in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They'd rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are.
Eric Greitens
#68. Don't do this for me - do this with me. A leader earns devotion by showing devotion.
Eric Greitens
#69. We all need something to struggle against and to struggle for. The aim in life is not to avoid struggles, but to have the right ones; not to avoid worry, but to care about the right things; not to live without fear, but to confront worthy fears with force and
Eric Greitens
#70. The best experts and the best mentors have flexible minds.
Eric Greitens
#71. In the name of "force protection," the military often rolls up windows, builds walls, and points rifles at the outside world. The best force protection, however, is to be surrounded by friends and allies.
Eric Greitens
#72. Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
Eric Greitens
#73. Teams that are moved by great purpose become tighter still when things are tough.
Eric Greitens
#74. Defeat is real. It is also temporary. We have to understand both. Faced for what it is, absorbed and met without self-deception, defeat can offer wisdom and motivation. Begin even though you know that you will suffer failure and defeat along the way.
Eric Greitens
#75. Don't expect a time in your life when you'll be free from change, free from struggle, free from worry. To be resilient, you must understand that your objective is not to come to rest, because there is no rest. Your objective is to use what hits you to change your trajectory in a positive direction.
Eric Greitens
#77. Remember that deciding is not doing, and wanting is not choosing.
Transformation will take place not because of what you decide you
want, but because of what you choose to do.
Eric Greitens
#78. Whatever my limited knowledge, I tried to make up for it with energy.
Eric Greitens
#79. Readiness is a form of humility, spurred by a recognition of how little we can know or control. Hardship is unavoidable. Resilient people recognize this reality. Then they prepare themselves for it, seeking to meet it as best they can, on their own terms.
Eric Greitens
#80. You don't have a choice about being an alcoholic. But you do get to choose what kind of alcoholic you're going to be: the kind who lets his addiction define his life, or the kind whose life is too rich and purposeful to be defined by addiction.
Eric Greitens
#81. Virtue is not about what you deny yourself, but what you make of yourself.
Eric Greitens
#82. In the midst of hardship and fear, suffering and difficulty, the person who's built the habit of focus harnesses tremendous power.
Eric Greitens
#83. Are you going to let what someone might say prevent you from doing what you must do?
Eric Greitens
#85. Often, your mentors are already in your life; you just haven't yet found a way to learn from them.
Eric Greitens
#86. A veteran who comes home from war is returning from one of the most intense experiences a human being can have. Even if he was not under fire every day, he woke up every morning as part of a team. He started every day with a purpose, and a mission that mattered to those around him.
Eric Greitens
#87. Seneca: Fate guides the willing but drags the unwilling.
Eric Greitens
#88. It's not enough to fight for a better world; we also have to live lives worth fighting for.
Eric Greitens
#90. The fox knows many things . . . the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Eric Greitens
#91. I was worried that all the corners of the earth had been explored, all the great battles fought. The famous people on TV were athletes and actresses and singers. What did they stand for? I wondered: Had the time for heroes passed?
Eric Greitens
#92. To work through pain is not to make it disappear, but to make it mean something different for us - to turn it into wisdom.
Eric Greitens
#93. Savor the flashes of wonder that light your life,
Eric Greitens
#94. Practice builds habits. Our habits are our character. When it comes to virtue, practice makes a very great difference - or rather, all the difference.
Eric Greitens
#95. Five variables go into training or practice of any kind: frequency, intensity, duration, recovery, and reflection.
Eric Greitens
#96. These moments of immersion, of engagement, of clear focus - moments that can last for hours, occasionally days - are some of the best times of our lives.
Eric Greitens
#97. For many people in the Western world, freedom is limited not so much by what others do to us, but by what we cannot do for ourselves. Walker,
Eric Greitens
#98. Fortune will play her hand. And when she stands between us and flourishing, all we can do is live our best life. One
Eric Greitens
#99. Hall, you should have died. Do pushups for being alive." Greg Hall knocked out twenty happy pushups and yelled, "Hooyah for being alive.
Eric Greitens
#100. Virtues that are not practiced die. Resilience that is not practiced weakens.
Eric Greitens
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