Quotes About Growth

Study, not in order to add anything to your knowledge, but to make your knowledge better.

You should keep learning as long as you are ignorant, – even to the end of your life, if there is anything in the proverb. And the proverb suits the present case as well as any: As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner – and my accuser is my sparring partner. He trains me in patience, civility and even temper.

Wisdom's seat is higher; she trains not the hands, but is mistress of our minds.

Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths.

It isn't possible to change your behaviour and still be the same person you were before.

A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner – and my accuser is my sparring partner. He trains me in patience, civility and even temper. [10] I mean, a doctor who puts me in a headlock and sets a dislocated pelvis or shoulder – he benefits me, however painful the procedure. So too does a trainer when he commands me to 'lift the weight with both your hands' – and the heavier it is, the greater the benefit to me.

You see, then, that it is necessary for you to become a student, that creature which every one laughs at, if you really desire to make an examination of your judgements. But this, as you are quite aware, is not the work of a single hour or day

Whenever we do something wrong, then, from now on we will not blame anything except the opinion on which it's based; and we will try to root out wrong opinions with more determination than we remove tumours or infections from the body. [36]

It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and rais'd in Ocean's pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.

If heaven may be found here and now, then heaven cannot be merely found in the absence of struggle as most of us assume, but in the very heart of our struggles. If Jesus' message is true, then our deepest challenges may offer our most profound opportunities. Heaven is found in the Dark Wood!

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.     104

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization?

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.

Patience is a byproduct of growth - we can bide our time when it is the time of our growth. There is no patience in acquisition or in the pursuit of power and fame. Nothing is so impatient as the pursuit of a substitute for growth.

The liberal sees the present as the legitimate offspring of the past and as constantly growing and developing toward an improved future: to damage the present is to maim the future. All three then cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to the idea of self-sacrifice.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.