Resilience of natural systems has been recently receiving increased attention due to its importance for achieving sustainability, especially in face of climate change. However, the term is often been used vaguely and with different intentions, leading to misinterpretations and confusion. More often than not, resilience is conceived as a perspective, rather than a clear and well-defined concept. For coastal systems, resilience can be even more difficult to define, as it is mainly viewed from a human perspective, focusing on the maintaining the services coastal systems provide (i.e., storm protection), rather than the sustainability of the coastal system itself. In this work we attempt to clarify resilience principles, to link resilience and adaptation with morphological dimensions and to provide means to quantitatively assess coastal resilience.