Quotes About Growth

flexibility of the self was the achievement of a rare maturity

We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.

To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy." And it is not easy precisely because so much of one has to die.

He has to try to get as many ways of earning self-esteem as possible, to constantly broaden his skills, the things he genuinely takes pleasure in, in place of what others think he should take pleasure in.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.

We can't ever go back to old things or try and get the "old kick" out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.

Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed. We never went back to the Vorarlberg and neither did the rich.

Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault.

You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.

We are stronger in our broken places.

I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.

But people do. They love each other and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and then suddenly they aren't the same one.