Quotes About Growth

They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upwards and outwards.

Progress would be wonderful — if only it would stop.

Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you'll locate the soft spots in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.

The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Then after a long time Annie wasn't a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.

We live in time so little time And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for eternity.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do

But why should I lie here longer? I am not dead yet … And the world's way is yet long to go, And I love the world even in my anger, And love is a hard thing to outgrow. —Robert Penn Warren, from "American Portrait: Old Style," Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978<.i> (Random House, 1978)

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

I am not a human being; I am a human becoming.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

Understanding, like a muscle, increases with use. The more you use it the more you have. That is why problems are interesting. They help you to apply your knowledge and to prove the Law. If it were not for your problems, you would vegetate. You would have no way of using or applying the Truth.

Ultimately, then, the purpose of every life challenge is the same: to grant us the opportunity to embrace that which we have so far resisted.

We can choose to feel angry, hurt, and burdened, or we can recognize that the experience, though painful, is a magnificent opportunity for enhanced self-understanding.

From the viewpoint of the soul, no event or course of action is "bad." All is simply experience, and every experience teaches and offers seeds of growth.

The shaming words were solid, immovable events in my life. What do you do with the solid and immovable? You build on it.

As youngest boy in service, the worst jobs fell to him, and this would