Quotes About Growth

our changes in height remained unmarked on the door frames, so we grew up tall on our own without proof

If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.

Places grow to have meaning in your life from experience, from the process of connecting. The inevitable contemplation of commemorative tattoos follows.

Life was good back then, in the crappy, oppressive way life is good for fourteen year olds, which is to say, it completely sucked but seems pretty good in the obscuring glare of nostalgia.

Aflac, the company that brought us the duck. In the year 2000, the company had a name recognition of 12 percent. Today it's 94 percent. And sales have gone up just as dramatically. Aflac sales in the American market went up 29 percent the first year after the duck arrived. And 28 percent the second year. And 18 percent the third year.

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.

In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are

Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.

To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.

In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.