Quotes About Self-improvement

Here's a pro-tip: there's no such thing as a 'gym person.' There are just people who go to the gym. Similarly, there's no such thing as a 'productive person.' There are just people who do productive things fairly often.

The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are. The last thing we want is to remain as we are.

If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business.

What better way of avoiding work than going to a workshop?

The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow. But she never forgets that Resistance is using criticism against her on a far more diabolical level.

boredom is a self-inflicted wound. Heal thyself.

These are the days that require discipline, when exercise is pure duty and the good feeling only comes later, consisting solely of self-congratulations for having done the job at all.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others."21

but it finally occurred to me that the time was going to pass anyway, I might as well try to have something to show for it

You need to learn to accept your flaws and forgive yourself.

I thought I was looking for something. Now I get that I was looking for someone. You. I'll go back to school and get my degree because it will make you happy. But also because it will make me the kind of man you want. This all about you, Aurelia. Don't you get that?

When we don't like something in someone else, a lot of the time it's because we don't like it in ourselves.

None of us is exactly how we want to be. The goal is to be the best person we can be, given our flaws.

It's easy to see what's wrong with other people. It's correcting our own lives that's hard.

She wanted a job she loved—she wanted to be excited about how she spent her day, instead of just going through the motions. She wanted to be proud of herself and strong and brave, and that meant she really had to get off her ass and do something.

Perhaps gardening could be a metaphor for life, she thought happily. Do a little digging and get rid of everything that's bothering you.

What she hadn't counted on was the fact that she couldn't see a way out. Which would have been something she could manage if only she'd been able to pretend that she wasn't the problem. Because her being the problem implied the only thing standing between her and happiness was herself, and how on earth was she supposed to fix that?

I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Contempt The contempt I feel for others—for myself different, less internal than guilt. It's not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad—through and through. I think I'm unattractive, unloveable, because I'm incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.). My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure.

Nobody can fix another person. But everybody tries.

Go and take what you want from life, Arnufo liked to counsel him. Don't wait for it to hand you something. Things given away freely are given away for a reason—because no one else wants them.

You can not become successful, until you develop into the person who can."

I knew how to block out my issues in a sprint, but in marathons I ran out of gas. Consistency became a critical problem. On days that I was inspired, I was unstoppable. But other days I would play bad chess. The time had come for me to learn the science of long-term, healthy, self-sustaining peak performance.

Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings—God knows I'd tried—and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.