Quotes About Growth

Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Oh hours of childhood, when behind each shape more than the past appeared and what streamed out before us was not the future. We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

Please don't, above all, plant me in your heart. I grow too quick.

We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.

Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working..

Isn't it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?

I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied at length, in detail; like a word I'm coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother's face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself— it seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don't know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

No feeling is final.

Live for a while in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books -of this I am certain- will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that's wide and timeless. So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace: a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.

Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings

Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become — it will, I am sure, go through the while fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.

But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring.

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.