Mandela on the Glory of Rising When We Fall

Last updated on: February 22, 2024 at 8:42 am by Andrew

Mandela on the Glory of Rising When We Fall 2024-02-22T08:42:31-05:00 Andrew

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Image credit: Midjourney AI, prompted by Netha Hussain @ Wikimedia Commons

Another one of my favorites from Nelson Mandela:

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”

I love this sentiment which is a strong underlying theme in one of my all-time favorite movie scenes from Rocky Balboa who gives a timeless life lesson to his son:

It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done…

To me, Mandela’s quote on the glory in rising when we fall is a much-needed compliment to his famous wisdom on losing as learning:

“I never lose. I either win or learn.”

For Mandela, if we are truly rising every time we fall – if we are truly adapting and evolving – there can be no losing as we are truly learning. There is a genius here in Mandela expressed similarly through Bruce Lee on the glory of defeat and the art of dying. In Lee’s words, it’s “not failure, but low aim, is the crime” and “in great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” For Lee, “to accept defeat, to learn to die is to be liberated from it” as “when I have listened to my mistakes, I have grown”. In that, “defeat in anything is merely temporary”.

Glory lies in giving our best effort and rising when we fall. If we’ve given our all, if we evolved and learned, there is no losing.

Image credit: Midjourney AI, prompted by Netha Hussain @ Wikimedia Commons

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