Seven Peace Pilgrim Quotes on Resilience

Peace Pilgrim was a remarkable woman who walked across America many times spreading a message of peace, beginning during the Korean War in 1953 and ending with her death in 1981. She vowed to keep walking until there was peace in the world, and she walked more than 25,000 miles before she stopped counting.

After her death, Peace Pilgrim’s friends compiled her writings and interviews into a book called Peace Pilgrim – Her Life and Work in Her Own Words. My copy of the book contains hundreds of underlined inspirational quotes, so I decided to pull some of them and curate them into lists that relate to our everyday lives.

Peace Pilgrim was especially wise in her guidance about resilience and personal strength. She taught that once we realize that we are in charge of our emotions, we become better able to deal with life’s ever-changing landscape. Here are seven quotes that might help you feel stronger and able to deal with the challenges often come out of the blue.

1. No outward thing—nothing, nobody from without—can hurt me inside, psychologically (20).
2. I recognize that I could only be hurt psychologically by my own wrong actions, which I have control over, by my own reactions, (they are tricky, but I have control over them, too); or by my own inaction in some situations (20).
3. If someone does the meanest thing to me, I feel the deepest compassion for that person and pray for that person—I do not hurt myself by a wrong reaction of bitterness or anger (159).
4. Anger-energy should not be suppressed, which could hurt you inside, nor expressed, which would hurt you inside and cause difficulties in your surroundings. It should be transformed by using it for a task that needs to be done or a beneficial form of exercise. If you will realize that the person who does an unkind thing is to some extent psychologically sick, anger will turn into compassion (152).
5. Now, if you are doing things you know you shouldn’t do and don’t really want to do, you certainly lack discipline (8).
6. Then make food a very incidental part of your life by filling your life so full of meaningful things that you’ll hardly have time to think about food (15).
7. One should rejoice at small gains and not be impatient, as impatience hampers growth (21).

Peace Pilgrim’s friends believed that to charge money for a book would be at odds with her core values and decided to offer it for free. They receive enough money in donations to publish and fulfill every request. You can order copies and other materials for free directly from Friends of Peace Pilgrim.

“THIS IS THE WAY OF PEACE:

OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD, 

FALSEHOOD WITH TRUTH, 

AND HATRED WITH LOVE.”

–PEACE PILGRIM

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