Quotes About Growth

For ten years I was alone, I filled the days with work, with the children, and with a few good friends. And I made a friend of myself. To have a friend you have to be one. You have to learn to like yourself—which usually means getting over a few had habits. I'm sure that I grew a little wiser, and I learned something about faith.

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference

Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be ore of what we've always been.

Bloom where you are planted,' the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ' plant yourself where you know you can bloom' may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, "Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible. Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.

We don't change as we get older—we just get to be more of what we've always been.

LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.

for beginners. After that, you can set out for

Benedict understood clearly that the function of leadership is to call us beyond ourselves, to stretch us to our limits, to turn the clay into breathless beauty. But first, of course, we have to allow it to happen.

Risk, the willingness to accept an unknown future with open hands and happy heart, is the key to adventures of the soul. Risk stretches us to discover the rest of ourselves - our creativity, our self-sufficiency, our courage. Without risk we live in a small world of small dreams and lost possibilities.

Everything new is not the end of the world. Instead, it is the beginning of a new way of being alive that is based on the past but has already grown beyond it.

We cannot expect life to be perfect. But we can expect to see life come from death. We can expect to see morning after night. We can expect that acceptance of the struggle will give rise to the victory over self.

We need to think again about the beauties of age, its freedom and its splendor. It is the "fresh life within" that age reveals to us, if we only give it a chance.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.

It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In later years, you fight because you do.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Lynn said that therapy was like separating the strands in a tangled web of yarn. It made sense that things would keep getting more separate for awhile so that we eventually came back together in an organized way. (205)